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New York’s rat population outnumbers its human residents by a wide margin, and one Friday-night hunting pack still does the job the old-fashioned way.
City health officials estimate somewhere between 250,000 and 2 million rats live beneath New York’s sidewalks, subway tunnels and tenement basements. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration answered with a $32 million extermination push, but a small band of dog handlers has been running its own operation since the 1990s — no poison, no traps, just terriers and dachshunds working an alley the way their breeds were built to.
- Mayor Bill de Blasio’s $32 million initiative targets “rat reservoirs” with poison, burrow traps and dry ice that suffocates rats as it melts and releases carbon dioxide.
- Richard Reynolds founded the Ryders Alley Trencher-fed Society (R.A.T.S.) in the 1990s and has hunted rats with dogs for roughly three decades, leading Friday-night patrols through Tompkins Square Park and the Lower East Side.
- In 2017, New York City Council member Eric Ulrich awarded the pack’s dogs “Vigilante Awards” in Ozone Park, Queens, for their rat-control efforts.
A Public Health Problem With a Body Count
Rats are woven into New York’s identity — Pizza Rat and Master Splinter are practically civic mascots — but the real infestation carries genuine danger. Last year, three people on a single Bronx block contracted leptospirosis from rat urine; only two survived. That case is part of why de Blasio’s health department has concentrated resources around public housing, replacing dirt basement floors, sealing passageways and escalating baiting and trapping efforts alongside the dry-ice burrow treatments.
Reynolds and the R.A.T.S. Method
Richard Reynolds, an American Kennel Club dog show judge by day, runs R.A.T.S. as a coordinated pack operation rather than a solo pest-control gig. On Friday nights he and fellow handlers bring Bedlington, Border and West Highland White terriers along with dachshunds into alleys, garbage heaps and parks, letting each breed play its role — some dogs flush rodents out from under dumpsters and nests, others intercept and dispatch them with a fatal shake that snaps the neck.
Reynolds is careful about the framing: this isn’t a municipal service, it’s a sport built around what these dogs were bred to do. Anyone curious about how deeply instinct drives certain breeds might also look at this Arabian dog fast enough to catch a gazelle — the same predatory wiring, just aimed at a different target on a different continent.
He only counts the ones that get away.
Science, Cheers and a City Council Commendation
The pack’s work has crossed over into research. Fordham University graduate student Matt Combs has collected DNA tissue and tail samples from rats killed on these hunts to map the genetics of New York’s urban rat population — data that’s harder to gather through poison and traps alone. Local residents tend to treat the Friday hunts as neighborhood theater, cheering the dogs on, and police officers have been known to point Reynolds toward the alleys with the worst infestations.
That informal partnership got formal recognition in 2017, when City Council member Eric Ulrich handed out “Vigilante Awards,” chew bones and treats to the dogs after a hunt in Ozone Park, Queens. It’s the kind of scene that wouldn’t feel out of place next to New York’s other unglamorous urban-wildlife stories, the same territory covered in pieces like Millions of Mice Are Terrorizing Australia, where an overwhelmed rodent population forces people into whatever control method actually works.
Two Approaches, One Target
De Blasio’s $32 million plan and Reynolds’ terriers are aimed at the same enemy but answer to different logic — one is a budget line item measured in reservoirs cleared, the other is a hobby that happens to double as pest control. Reynolds isn’t angling to replace dry ice and burrow traps; he just keeps showing up on Fridays with the same dogs, working the same blocks around Tompkins Square Park, because that’s what the breed in front of him was built for three centuries before anyone in City Hall had a rat budget at all.
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