The rat hunters of New York

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Richard Reynolds is not the “rat guy.” Yes, he has a closer-than-normal connection with rats. Yes, he sees a lot of them, even spends his Friday nights seeking them out. But if you ask him, as many do, he’s not “that rat guy.” He is, he insists, a verminologist— the best verminologist in New York City, he is quick to add.

But Reynolds knows a lot about rats. He knows that a rat’s gestation period is twenty-three days, its average litter size is ten to twelve, and mortality after birth is about a third. Start with two rats today, he tells me, and you’ll have 24,000 in a year.

“Its been said that in New York City, you’re never more than thirty feet from a rat,” Reynolds, leader of the Ryder’s Alley Trencher-fed Society (R.A.T.S., for short), said. “If that’s not literally true, then it’s pretty near.”

Richard Reynolds during a hunt near Broome Street.

Reynolds leads his assemblage of trackers and undersized hunting dogs to alleys in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, seeking the massive piles of garbage that businesses put out on Friday nights. These stinking heaps harbor the most rats—the crew’s preferred quarry. The group’s main goal is to exercise their dogs’ natural instincts—terriers especially, they argue, were bred to hunt vermin over the past few hundred years. And helping to control the pest problem in New York’s alleyways doesn’t hurt, either.

“Our hunts, they suit both the places we hunt and it suits the terriers—they do what they were born to do,” Reynolds, a former foxhunter and dog show judge, says. “They love it, we get our kicks out of it.”

He commutes from New Jersey to City Hall Park for his Friday expeditions. His motley band takes requests from rat-weary residents and restaurant owners concerned by rats scuttling by their doorstep, which scare away customers.

Many owners administer Amoxcillin to their canine killers for several days before the hunt to ward off rat-borne illnesses. Pant legs duct-taped shut, they poke through trash piles with metal staffs and swing their flashlights side to side, eyes peeled for that soft, startling rustle that signifies the prey is close at hand.

Ernie searches for rats in an alleyway near City Hall Park.

“We depend on a certain amount of filth,” Reynolds says, stabbing a big black bag with the end of his walking stick. The group had moved on to Eden’s Alley, a few blocks away from the first hunting grounds. But the hunting was no good. Reynolds even walked the group up to his favorite spot, a two-by-two sliding red trap door built into the wall of a winding side alley years before to close a rusted-out hole in a metal plate. “That’s the rat door,” he says. “Through that door have passed gazillions of rats.” Mighty, a sleek black terrier on his first hunt, scratched at the door, sniffing its handle in search of one.

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