A federal lawsuit was settled in Manhattan last Friday, but it did nothing to stop the stomach-churning scene described therein from entering New York City’s extensive rat lore.
The operators of Ya Feng Trading Inc, a meat and chicken warehouse in Chinatown, were targeted by federal prosecutors last year for violating the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Poultry Products Inspection Act, according to The New York Times.
Federal inspectors discovered in April 2022 that an army of rats had been gorging themselves on over 43,000 pounds of meat and poultry housed in the facility.
Rodent feces, gnawed meat products, a dead mouse, a rat scurrying up the leg of one of the inspectors, and four rats measuring a foot long running into a cooler were just some of the sights reported during the inspection, per NYT.
Court documents revealed that Ya Feng’s owner and president Linmin Yang later admitted to having been aware of the warehouse’s “serious rodent issue” after that inspection. He confessed to selling contaminated meat and poultry for a few weeks before voluntarily destroying the tainted stock.
Yang and Ya Feng’s manager, Kong Ping Ni, were both subjects of the federal lawsuit.
A press release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York explained that between December 2018 and April 2022, the two defendants sold “hundreds of pounds of misbranded meat and poultry products” and failed to maintain sales records.
The defendants resolved the federal case by agreeing to refrain from working with meat and poultry for three years, according to the press release.
Since being made public, the case now figures in the annals of New York City’s rodent-related tales, some of which conjure images just as horrific, such as the 2020 Bronx sidewalk cave-in.
Leonard Shoulders, 33, was just waiting for the bus when he suddenly broke through the sidewalk and found himself trapped in a hole filled with rats for half an hour.
Some rat chronicles are slightly less traumatizing, such as 2015’s infamous “Pizza Rat,” which laboriously dragged a piece of pizza down some subway stairs.
Some in the city have even taken to mixing pet care with doing their part for their community, with several dog owners in the Big Apple forming a rat-hunting club.
As previously reported in The Dallas Express, New York City appointed its very first rat czar — former elementary school teacher Kathleen Corradi.
The brown rat — also known as Rattus norvegicus — has been a nuisance for New Yorkers since it came to the city aboard ships from Europe in the 1700s and proliferated in the densely populated urban sprawl.
It remains to be seen whether Corradi’s “accelerated rat reduction plan,” estimated to cost taxpayers $3.5 million, will achieve results.
