Culture
New York's Rat Population Is Far Smaller Than You Might Guess
The latest tally of the city's rat horde dispels the myth that the city is home to "one rat per person."
Are there really as many rats in New York as people? Answering that hoary urban legend might not win anybody a Nobel Prize of Statistics, but it's a fascinating topic for a city where rats cause an estimated quarter of all cable-line cuts and unsolved fires.
Jonathan Auerbach is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University and the most recent brain to crunch the numbers on New York's rat horde. Past estimates have ranged from an extreme infestation of 28 million whiskered pests to 8.4 million, or the city's current population. That last estimate reflects the popular "one rat per person" ideology, which is shaky at best, according to Snopes: