In June, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, made an announcement at the City Council that divided opinions among the city’s politicians: the creation of a committee to assess the possibility of the Parisian population (continuing to) live with the more than 6 million of rats scattered through the streets and businesses of the French capital.
The decision was taken after constant appeals from animal protection organizations and leftist parties involved with the cause, which advocate milder alternatives, other than the extermination of rodents.
Among the options presented are the use of oral contraceptives, to reduce the fertility of the plague, and the adoption of more closed dumpsters around the city, which today only keeps about 10% of them covered, according to the city hall itself.
Deputy Mayor Anne Souyris, a member of the French Ecological Party and responsible for public health, will lead the committee, which is expected to identify solutions to the impasse. According to her, during the meeting at the municipal body, she intends to “discover how residents can ‘cohabit’ with rats, without the population being more affected by it”.
The socialist’s announcement caused an uproar at the Paris Council. Opposition parties accuse the mayor of not paying due attention to a public health problem.
The deputy mayor of one of the capital’s districts, Geoffroy Boulard, is a supporter of the extermination of rats. For him, the decision is just a way to mask the lack of investment in public health in Paris.
The millions of rodents spread across the French capital are an old problem, being found in subways, in tourist spots like the Eiffel Tower, in open parks and in restaurants, where they manage to find food easily, with the high flow of people.
According to recent data from the National Academy of Medicine, Paris currently has 1.5 rats for each inhabitant, that is, there are more rodents than people in the city.
Animal protection organizations celebrated the decision as a years-long struggle. For the co-founder of the NGO Animaux Zoopolis, Amandine Salvisens, who participated in the council meeting, investing in the extermination of rats is “ineffective and cruel”, as previous political projects would have demonstrated.
historical problem
Paris, like other major urban centers, has a history of rodent problems. In the year he took over as mayor, in 2014, Hidalgo promised a plan to “deratize” Paris, with investments of 1.5 million euros.
However, after nine years of his administration, the situation has not improved, with episodes of closure of parks and gardens in the French capital due to rodent infestation in 2016.
In March of this year, a street sweeper strike in the city contributed, once again, to the worsening of the problem, since food was exposed in the garbage cans and on the streets for longer.
According to the French newspaper Le Figarothe type of rat that lives in the streets of Paris is not the same one that transmits the bubonic plague, but it is the transmitter of leptospirosis and toxoplasmosis.
A statement from the National Academy of Medicine explained that these rodents are a more dangerous species because of their adaptability to the environment, their rapid reproduction and the diseases they are capable of transmitting, by viruses, bacteria or parasites.
Even so, some parties take the issue to the ideological side, including petitions against combating rats.
In 2016, after the socialist announced a new plan to control the plague, a petition with 17,000 signatures was sent to the city hall, going against the policy of “genocide of rodents”.
Lula supporter mayor
Socialist Anne Hidalgo is an admirer of President Lula. In October 2019, he was granted the title of honorary citizen of the French capital, at which time the petista, convicted in the second instance of corruption by Operation Lava Jato, was still imprisoned in Curitiba.
After being released, he received the honor during a visit to Paris, a trip made alongside Dilma Rousseff and Fernando Haddad.
The petista was honored during a session of the Council of Paris for his “engagement in reducing social and economic inequalities” in Brazil.
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