What happens to the thousands of dead NYC rats that are being exterminated with a wildly successful new method
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- Rats are now being eliminated with carbon monoxide in New York City.
- Some dead rats get carried away, but others get buried.
- A rat exterminator spoke to Insider about why he prefers this method.
Rats are being killed left and right in New York City. But what happens with all the dead rodent corpses?
They get a burial, of course.
Matt Deodato, an exterminator fighting the rat battle in New York told Insider that he collapses the burrows that rats reside in after killing them with carbon monoxide.
Although, in the past, Deodato said he relied on companies to haul away the dead pests — or dear friends, to those who care — leaving them there has been beneficial, in his opinion.
"If you walk into a room and it's full of smoke, you're going to presume there's a fire there and you're going to stay out of that room, right? You're not going to walk into a smokey house and say, 'Oh, it's okay, it's a little smoke,'" Deodato, who also goes by "Matt the Rat Killer" in some circles, told Insider.
Deodato said this concept applies to the rats as well.
"I believe the rat does the same thing as it picks up the odor of decaying matter, a decaying rat. It figures, 'Whatever killed that rat could kill me.' So it kind of stays away from that area."
From his observations, he has found that the rats are now thinking twice about burrowing in certain areas.
New York continues to struggle with its rat infestation problem. Just last year, residents reported nearly 3.2 million rat sightings in the city, Insider previously reported.
The city has tried everything from outdoor traps to rat poison.
However, NYC recently found a newer, and more humane, method. Pumping carbon monoxide into burrows is working to eliminate tons of rats. Per Gothamist, the city got rid of nearly all the rats from 100 rat burrows on a street in the city's Upper East Side.
"It's very quick," Deodato previously told Insider. "It's effective."