Three things in life are unavoidable: death, taxes and rats. As anyone who has walked back from Lauinger Library late at night can testify, rats have no problem infesting our Hilltop. I’m not talking about FBI informants (though I’m sure we have had a fair share of those), but a plague of the four-legged variety that gives last fall’s norovirus outbreak a run for its money.

Campus is peppered with signs about H1N1 virus prevention and about how committed the university is to public health, but we are content to let our grounds (and, let’s face it, many of our buildings) be overrun by rodents. Does anyone else see the irony? Although I haven’t seen any evidence linking rats to H1N1, the university cannot claim to be health-conscious until it addresses the rat issue. The Black Death should be evidence enough.

Some students, such as those members of the Facebook group “Rats are HOYAS too!” have argued that people like me are unjustly giving rats a bad name. They have to live somewhere, so why not here? My response? The rats are welcome to stay – if they agree to pay Georgetown tuition like everyone else.

Thankfully, the rat situation has caught the attention of the Georgetown University Student Association, and hopefully the university as well. Clearly there is an issue with dealing with the rats, likely compounded by the difficulty of assessing the cause of their population explosion.

One theory is that there hasn’t been a significant change in the number of rats, but that many of the rats used to hide in the old trash cans; now that campus has switched to the solar-compactor units, there are fewer places for the rats to hide. I initially thought this was plausible.

But over the last few nights, I’ve seen some gigantic rats that could easily knock over a trash can, but would have a hard time squeezing into or underneath one.

Another theory postulates that there has been a population change in another species in the food chain. This makes sense. I haven’t seen very many black squirrels of late. Perhaps the rats have been eating all of their food (or maybe even the squirrels themselves; I wouldn’t put it past the monster I saw outside Copley Hall last week).

Has there been a decline in the rats’ predators that the university can address? I recognize the ecological difficulties with introducing new species such as owls. An alternative could be to use plastic birds to scare the rats, but fake hawks probably won’t get the job done. Could we use the real thing? That would probably do the trick – but once the rats are gone, what’s to stop the hawks from picking off a freshman (or a 5-foot-2 opinion columnist, for that matter)? Students have suggested laying traps, but that could be a big liability for any unassuming student walking through a danger zone.

Clearly there are drawbacks to all of the proposals made thus far, which may in part explain the university’s inability to solve the problem. Lots of problems have obvious solutions that haven’t been implemented, whether because of a lack of funding or a fear of leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths. Fear not, my solution solves both problems: We hypnotize the rats, march them down O Street and sell them to Kitchen No. 1.

Colin Nagle is a junior in the College. He can be reached at naglethehoya.com. Getting in Tune appears every other Friday.

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