Open Collections

Lee, Michael

University of British Columbia

Rats are an important urban issue. Despite the continual implementation of municipal management efforts, rats continue to flourish in cities, indicating that municipalities have not been able to find or widely implement solutions that are able to sustainably eliminate rat populations. There is no consensus why management efforts may have failed and there is limited research describing or comparing municipal rat management approaches. The objective of this thesis was to begin exploring the characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, barriers, and opportunities associated with the theory and practice of municipal rat management with a view towards providing recommendations for cities seeking to develop or improve their own rat management strategies. To achieve this objective, we triangulated four data sources, each comprising a different perspective of what the municipal rat problem and its solutions are. To gather this data, we traveled to seven cities with municipal rat management programs, interviewed program stakeholders, attended site visits with management programs, gathered rat-related municipal regulations, and synthesized the peer-reviewed and grey literature. We qualitatively analyzed these data sources in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 and found that municipal rat management has focused on reducing rat populations at as large a scale as possible using approaches that have changed little over the past century in terms of objectives, methods, and outcomes. In Chapter 5, we compare these data sources and conclude that this issue does not appear to be solvable because it is a wicked problem comprised of a complex system in which peoples’ perception of the problem depends upon their connection to rats in this system. As a result, the traditional rat-focused perspective does not account for the problems that people care about such that these approaches are likely to perpetually exist in a state of limited stakeholder and resource investment. We suggest that what is needed to move the field forward is to reconceptualize the problem to focus on managing the interfaces in which rats and people interact. We explore how this focus can change the way that cities approach rat management and outline strategies for identifying and addressing those interfaces.

Text

2022-08-25

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/82529

Population and Public Health

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/