【高级听力】（文末附视频）How Rats Take Advantage of Human Failure
How Rats Take Advantage of Human Failure
《文 末 附 视 频》
This may not be a word-for-word transcript.
Welcome to New York City – home of pizza rat, subway rat, and escalator rat. This is a town of rats, and those rats have to be studied by people with flashlights. One of those people is rodentologist Bobby Corrigan.
Bobby Corrigan: I’m an urban rodentologist, so I study just the rodents of cities.
Nobody knows exactly how many rats there are in the city, but it’s estimated that there could be millions and that’s great news, because the more rats you have, the better. I’m totally kidding, obviously.
It’s hard to imagine a creature that’s more despised than a street rat, but is it really their fault?
Rats carry some pretty gnarly diseases like E. Coli, Salmonella, and West Nile virus, as well as rat bite fever which, despite how it sounds, was not an obscure 50s dance craze.
In 2014, Columbia University studied rats inside residential buildings in New York and found that they’re even grosser than we thought. The research confirmed that urban rats carried 15 pathogens and 18 viruses that had never been seen before in the city. I went to Chinatown in Manhattan with Bobby, to see what’s enabling these critters to live their best rat life.
Bobby Corrigan: I look for what I call you know conducive conditions. I mean, just look at the gutter, it’s especially by five, six o’clock, this gutter is a complete buffet. Here’s a bag of food trash. Where’d it come from? Who knows? You can see this little basket is just, it’s a simple ladder, right up this in and in and then out. And then...a nice rat cave.
So Bobby, what else helps them?
Bobby Corrigan: Trains, planes, automobiles, sewer lines, electrical lines, you name it and this animal is usually taking advantage of it. Any crack or crevice that is a half an inch in height and width is easy opportunity for the rat to dark into.
Let’s not get run over. You’ll notice here this big giant gap below this door, a rat would not even have to duck there getting to whatever’s on the other side of that – that warm door. It’s as simple as putting in a rat strip at the base of a door, which costs all of $85, so it’d be silly not to do that. You know, the word rodent means “to gnaw,” so anything that’s linear like a wire, on an airplane, or a wire on a subway, or the wire that’s in your own home, then they’re gnawing that, and that’s a problem.
It’s actually a really big problem. Every year, in the US, it’s estimated that rats cause $19 billion worth of damage.
Bobby Corrigan: So how much of our behavior contributes to the success of the city rat? It’s a lot.
The amount of solid waste humans generate every year has been steadily rising for decades. Our behavior is one of the biggest reasons rats prosper in cities. If something as simple as installing a door strip can help keep rats in check, then why do we spend our time making viral videos about how disgusting they are, instead of fixing the problem?
Bobby Corrigan: We can be really lazy and we don’t think through things. There’s lots of things(美式口语用法：there is + plural) we can do on a daily basis within a city that would deny the rat – its existence. So, I’m just one person out of, say, eight to ten million New Yorkers. What can I do? It’s actually pretty simple. Everybody generates somewhere between 4 and 6 pounds of trash every 24 hours. Be a smart mammal. Whatever you do with your trash, ask yourself can the rats get to it?
The city’s helping out, too. Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $32 million plan last year that would introduce new rat proof trash cans so no more wire basket rat ladders. And there’d be better trash management and pickup as well.
Bobby Corrigan: We tend to take care of pests after they become a problem, in other words, we let them get established and then we hire exterminators or we go out, we buy some traps. All of that is after the fact instead of doing it proactively, I don’t know, maybe we should call ourselves homoreactus.
So, is this a hopeless fight? Should we just all lay down in the trash-filled gutter and give up?
Bobby Corrigan: It is not true that you can never get rid of rats. That’s not true. You know, what…what is true is they can be managed through human behavior. This species is very industrious, hard-working, if you will. You know, they have the ability to adapt to environmental conditions that can be pretty extreme, but they’re overpopulated in many cases because human beings make it so good for them, quite frankly.
So in many ways, will the rat maybe outlive us? I’m gonna think it will. I’m gonna think it will.
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