Left image via Shutterstock / right image via The Guardian //

Makes outdoor dining a thousand times less appealing…

The fabled New York City rat is something us Aussies haven’t had to encounter, but damn, the stories we’ve heard of them are enough to make our skin crawl. Already feisty little buggers that will stop at nothing to cop a feed, the infamous rodents have now graduated to attacking outdoor diners, and it’s all due to COVID-19.

Yes, the annoyingness of COVID-19 is now spreading to the rat population, as NYC’s two million rodents have been forced into a state of starvation due to COVID-19 and the drastically reduced amount of waste discarded by NYC restaurants as a result. But since allowing outdoor dining to resume on June 22, the rodents have returned with a vengeance, crawling on customers’ shoes and tables to steal a bite of their hard-earned food.

“Any mammals, if you take the food away you’re going to have abnormal behavior show up really quick,” urban rodentologist Dr. Bobby Corrigan said.

Thus, countless business owners & residents are urging the city to get on top of the problem, but between combating the COVID-19 pandemic and safely restarting the economy, they have their hands just a bit full. But there are select individuals taking it upon themselves to fight the power, with people like Elias Schewel and his dog Sundrop going out four times a night to hunt rats around Brooklyn. They’ve had some pretty big success, killing as many as 20 rats in four hours.

“It’s actually been a great pleasure of mine watching Sundrop learn how to make a kill,” Schewel told the station. “It’s like whack-a-mole.”

Well, if Elias and Sundrop manage to keep that up for around 120 thousand hours, NYC might just have cleared their rat problem, but somehow we doubt that’s likely to happen…