Curtis Sliwa's Feral Cat Vigilantes Will Clean Up This Dirty Town

In New York City, all discourse is, at its root, rat discourse. The issues confronting our metropolis are myriad—housing, open space, health care, City services, qUaLiTy oF LiFe, to name but a few—but at the center of this sprawling Venn diagram, where all the circles overlap like so many tangled hairless tails, sits the ultimate New Yorker: the rat.

Rats! Their size, regrettable locations where they have been sighted, novel ways to murder them, unusual rat behavior that may or may not have been part of an elaborate hoax—we love to talk about rats.

New York City journalists know: Rats sell papers. If J. Jonah Jameson were real, he'd be sending Peter Parker out to get more photos of rats to run under giant lurid headlines. We ourselves are not above the odd bit of rat content now and then, but the New York Post knows this truth perhaps better than anyone, which is why they've been flogging the sighting of rats at an Upper West Side playground for the last several days.

Now the Post is back with a follow-up, pitching a slow one across the plate for Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa by asking him how he'd handle the rat problem. Sliwa has a ready and thought-provoking answer: If we wish to contain the urban blight of lawless, anarchic rats, we must empower our own gang of rough-around-the-edges hooligans to hold the line. The vigilante force Sliwa has in mind? Feral cats.