Paris mayor urges citizens to make friends with rats

Brand new garbage cans on the streets of Paris, death traps, thorough cleaning of the streets – alas, the authorities are clearly losing in the fight against rats. One thing remains – to learn to live with rodents peacefully, in a good neighborly way.

Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of the French capital, under criticism for his inability to deal with the rats running through the streets, creates a working group on “living together” with these animals. This was announced on June 8 by her health assistant, tells newspaper Le Figaro:

“There is a question about cohabitation. Recently, the mayor and I also decided to form a committee on (…) this cohabitation. To be as efficient as possible and to ensure a normal life, so that it is not unbearable for the Parisians.”

This is how environmentalist Ann Suiris responded to the words of the mayor of the Republic of Lithuania of the 17th arrondissement, Geoffroy Boulard, who, during the Paris Council, proposed to her “a more ambitious plan to combat the spread of rats.” The mayor of Paris wants to teach citizens to coexist peacefully with rodents after all measures to combat them were unsuccessful.

Criticized for the fact that the capital has recently bred 6 million rats for 2.14 million inhabitants, Ann Hidalgo, after several years of unsuccessful struggle with rodents, announced that she intends to take a different approach and try to achieve a more peaceful coexistence with these animals.

The fight against rats has cost taxpayers dearly: since 2017, the authorities have spent 1.7 million euros to install sealed garbage cans throughout the city and the widespread use of rat poison. And… the rats are still briskly moving through the streets, causing disgust and panic among the townspeople and numerous tourists.

Now, said assistant mayor Anne Suiris, Hidalgo will create a working group on “cohabitation” with rodents and other carriers of infections and diseases. The group will be given the task of finding a method of dealing with rats that will prove “effective” and “not unbearable” for the Parisians.

Together with the Pasteur Institute, the Sorbonne and the Natural History Museum, the mayor’s office has launched a research project that will help in the “fight against prejudice” in order to “help Parisians coexist better with rats.”

Ecologist Duska Markovic, who was present at the Paris council, said that rats are actually “beneficial” in the ecosystem and severely chided those Parisians who for some reason have an “abnormal, unreasonable fear” of rodents.

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