Last month, Gothamist broke the disturbing news that someone had released hundreds of domestic white rats on the median of the West Side Highway near 57th Street in Manhattan. These domestic animals were doomed to perish in this environment, and to make this criminal act of animal abandonment worse, the NYC Dept. of Sanitation called exterminators to put down poison.

A few dedicated people stepped in and went nightly to capture and remove as many of these rats as possible, but the task has been monumental and the situation is ongoing. A rescue in NJ (HALT) agreed to take in as many rats as we could catch, and without their help, these rats would have been doomed. HALT has taken in more than 300 of these rats including pregnant females and those showing symptoms of the poison. Though we believe most have been rescued, we continue to receive reports of sightings and we are still finding rats in the median. Some of the rats have been adopted out to loving permanent homes but many more adopters are needed.

We have no local vet providing free or discounted medical care, and we have relied on the kindness of rehabbers and vets outside the city to provide us with medications. We have been working on saving these rats, who are victims of a criminal act of abandonment, and victims of a city who wants to poison them.

We demand that the City stop poisoning these rats and assist us with our efforts to protect these and other neglected animals. We also demand a criminal investigation be launched into who was responsible for the release of these rats. Acts of criminal animal cruelty cannot be left unpunished, or they are bound to occur again in the future.