Katie, a 4-year-old dog who lives in Brooklyn, is gaining fame across the country as New York City’s secret weapon in the war on rats. Katie weighs just 12 1/2 pounds and is about 4 years old. According to her doggie DNA test, she is 28% Chihuahua, 16% pug, 16% rat terrier and 40% good ol’ mutt. Sarah Darby, 50, an educational consultant by day, adopted Katie from a shelter in Texas, near the Mexican border, in 2022. Not too long after, Darby said, “I was walking her in a playground that had tons and tons of rats and she sort of revealed to me her interest in doing this.”
This rescue “mutt” has killed nearly 500 rats this year.
As The New York Times reports, in 2023, Katie bagged 115 rats. With about a week to go this year, she’s closing in on 500. A color-coded Google map, titled “Katie’s rats 2024,” shows that about 40% of the kills were in Prospect Park; the rest were on the sidewalks of the Park Slope and Gowanus neighborhoods. All were within about a mile of Darby’s home, and nearly all, she said, had occurred within the orbit of a garbage can or bag of trash. Katie’s most prolific month was September. For some reason, her most productive day of the week is Thursday.
Katie has found an endless supply of prey even amid Mayor Eric Adams’ loudly declared war on rats, including his recent push to move the city’s signature mounds of trash bags from sidewalks into bins. The city’s rat czar, Kathleen Corradi, is introducing comprehensive pest management techniques in four “Rat Mitigation Zones.” In the Harlem zone, rats have been so mitigated that a social club of dog owners who took their dogs ratting in Manhattan every Friday night for 30 years recently gave up.
“You get one or two, but it’s not what we’re there for,” said Richard Reynolds, the organizer of the Ryders Alley Trencher-fed Society, better known as RATS. His ratters now split their hunting time between pursuing wild boar in the Deep South and for-hire work tackling mouse infestations at food warehouses. But in Katie’s neighborhood, rat sightings are up 11% since last year.
Before she goes out hunting, Darby stands in her kitchen and folds paper towel sheets into perfect crisp rectangles. “I used to bring only two, and then that was not enough,” she said recently as Katie sat beside her on the floor, eyes raised, ears focused, waiting for the sign that it was time. “Then I would bring four, and that was not enough. So now I bring six.” She slipped them into her purse.
The only night she ran out of paper towels was October 10, a Thursday, when Katie killed eight rats, her record. Darby picked up the last two with a potato chip bag she found in the trash.
Officially, Prospect Park does not have a rat problem. “Rats are not an issue in Prospect Park, point blank,” said Morgan Monaco, president of the Prospect Park Alliance, the nonprofit group that manages the 526-acre park. “Of course rats live here,” she added, “but they don’t pose the same kind of health hazards as in some other parks.” Maybe that’s because Katie’s on patrol.
On residential streets, the city hopes a new rule requiring homeowners and small landlords to use rat-resistant garbage bins with lids will put a big dent in the rats’ food supply. But Darby is skeptical.
On another night this fall, she and Katie were out street-hunting when Katie heard a scrabbling sound coming from a lidded trash can. Darby rapped on the lid, as if knocking on someone’s door. A rat appeared at a hole, just below the lip of the can, jumped to the ground and dashed away. Another rat appeared at the hole seconds later and leaped. Katie caught it before it hit the ground. “That’s their highway,” Darby said. “They have their own entrance and exit, just like a cat door.”
Darby confessed that it had taken her some time to embrace Katie’s obsession as her own. “I had gotten soft living in the city,” she said. Over time, she has grown to enjoy the nightly adventure. “My life is not very crazy otherwise,” she said, “and this is an aspect of my life that’s like, totally bonkers.”
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