New York City’s secret weapon in the war on rats: Katie the dog
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Katie, a four-year-old dog who lives in Brooklyn, is New York City’s secret weapon in the war on rats and during her searches, prey isn’t hard to find.
PHOTO: SARA KONRADI/NYTIMES
Andy Newman
NEW YORK – Katie the dog and Ms Sarah Darby entered Prospect Park in Brooklyn beneath a full hunter’s moon. Ms Darby switched on Katie’s red LED collar, unclipped her leash and Katie sprinted off.
Katie disappeared around a bend, and when Ms Darby caught up, Katie was circling a trash can. “Ready, Katie?” She tilted back the trash can. A plump rat darted out.
A blurred chase lasted only a second. Katie snatched the squeaking rat in her jaws, whipped her head back and forth, and snapped its neck. She dropped the limp rat, and Ms Darby used a folded paper towel to pick it up by the tail and drop it in the trash can, among banana peels and muffin liners.
It was Katie’s 363rd kill of 2024. Her 364th came nine minutes later.
Katie weighs 6kg and is about four years old. She is 28 per cent Chihuahua, 16 per cent pug, 16 per cent rat terrier and 40 per cent mutt.
Ms Darby, 50, an educational consultant, adopted Katie from a shelter in Texas, near the Mexican border, in 2022. Not too long after, she said Katie displayed her interest in catching rats one day while walking her in a rodent-filled playground.
In 2023, Katie bagged 115 rats. A colour-coded Google map, titled “Katie’s rats 2024”, shows that about 40 per cent of the kills were in Prospect Park. The rest were on the sidewalks of the Park Slope and Gowanus neighbourhoods.
All were within about a 1.6km of Ms Darby’s home, and nearly all, she said, had occurred within the orbit of a garbage can or bag of trash. Katie’s most prolific month was September. For some reason, her most productive day of the week is Thursday.
Katie has found an endless supply of prey even amid New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ loudly declared war on rats, including his recent push to move the city’s signature mounds of trash bags from sidewalks into bins.
Ms Kathleen Corradi, the city’s first director of rodent mitigation, also known as the “rat czar”, introduced comprehensive pest management techniques in four Rat Mitigation Zones.
In the Harlem zone, rats have been so mitigated that a social club of dog owners who took their dogs ratting in Manhattan every Friday night for 30 years recently gave up.
But in Katie’s neighbourhood, rat sightings are up 11 per cent since 2023.
Ms Sarah Darby and her dog, Katie, on their way back to their apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, after a walk in Prospect Park.
PHOTO: SARA KONRADI/NYTIMES
Before she goes out hunting, Ms Darby stands in her kitchen and folds paper towel sheets into crisp rectangles.
“I used to bring only two, and then that was not enough,” she said recently as Katie sat beside her on the floor, eyes raised, ears focused, waiting for the sign that it was time. “Then I would bring four, and that was not enough. So now, I bring six.”
She slipped them into her purse.
The only night she ran out of paper towels was Oct 10, a Thursday, when Katie killed eight rats, her record. Ms Darby picked up the last two with a potato chip bag she found in the trash.
Officially, Prospect Park does not have a rat problem.
“Rats are not an issue in Prospect Park, point blank,” said Ms Morgan Monaco, president of the Prospect Park Alliance, the non-profit group that manages the 2.13 sq km park.
“Of course rats live here,” she added, “but they don’t pose the same kind of health hazards as in some other parks.”
On residential streets, the city hopes a new rule requiring home owners and small landlords to use rat-resistant garbage bins with lids will put a big dent in the rats’ food supply.
Ms Darby is sceptical. On another night, she and Katie were out street-hunting when Katie heard a scrabbling sound coming from a lidded trash can.
Ms Darby rapped on the lid, as if knocking on someone’s door. A rat appeared at a hole, just below the lip of the can, jumped to the ground and dashed away. Another rat appeared at the hole seconds later and leapt. Katie caught it before it hit the ground.
“That’s their highway,” Ms Darby said. “They have their own entrance and exit, just like a cat door.”
She confessed that it had taken her some time to embrace Katie’s obsession as her own. “I had gotten soft living in the city,” she said.
Over time, she has grown to enjoy the nightly adventure. “My life is not very crazy otherwise,” she said, “and this is an aspect of my life that’s like, totally bonkers.” NYTIMES
