A Mischief of Rats

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This editorial is intended as a friendly, cheer-up gesture to our friends in the 7th District of Maryland. They’re stinging from the insults of President Trump, who, in a feud with Congressman Elijah Cummings, sent out a twitter characterizing the district as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.” The jibe was met with a riposte by a Baltimore native, CNN’s Victor Blackwell, who choked up in a broadcast that has been widely viewed.

We hope Mr. Blackwell can take some comfort in the fact that when it comes to rats, Baltimore has got nothing on Mr. Trump’s hometown. The other day we were transferring trains at West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. Standing on the north end of the platform for an A Train, we glanced over to discover a whole mischief of rats — big as day. These rodents were the size of a Volkswagen. What got us is that they were yakking away like they owned the place.

Too, they failed to disperse when the train arrived. We were eyeing them out of the corner of our eye as we stepped onto the rattletrap, and we could see them out of the window as the train pulled away. Some of them even ride the subways, as Baltimoreans can see in the YouTube video at the top of this editorial. It captures New Yorkers standing on subway seats in horror — some are laughing — as a rat scurries around the subway car.

It doesn’t take long to discover, via the Internet, that rats have been infesting New York for centuries, going back to colonial times. In one video, a reporter is given a tour by a rodentologist. That expert doubts that there is a rat for every one of the 8 million New Yorkers, but he does estimate that hundreds of thousands of the rodents live in the city. Another piece on the Web reckons the New York rat population at 2 million.

It’s not our intention here to make light of Mr. Trump’s swipe at Baltimore, even if Congressman Cummings hasn’t been all that flattering in respect of the President. It’s merely to mark such facts as that a Web site called AutomaticTrap.com offers a ranking of the top five rat-infested cities. It seems to be based on the sales of traps. It puts New York in second place, after Chicago but way worse than Baltimore. It turns out that a group of rats is called a “mischief” — not, it seems, for nothing.


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