Howie Severino’s I-Witness Documentary: “RATS AND THE CITY”
Airing Monday midnight: February 25, 2008
GMA7 (a day or two later on Pinoy TV overseas)
Cinematography: Egay Navarro
On the eve of the New Year of the Rat, Howie Severino travels to New York City, the city with the world’s most notorious rodent problem. He brings along his own rat Brownie from Quiapo, a puppet that New Yorkers react to with both horror and amusement. Brownie is the ice breaker for many a conversation about rats.
In this winter travelogue, Howie and his sidekick accompany a Filipino rat exterminator and join rat year celebrations in Chinatown. They discover some of New York’s large pests in subway tunnels late at night feasting on garbage.
But the duo encounter the most rats in the unlikeliest place, a wealthy New York neighborhood where they discover a network of rat lovers who treat them with tender loving care and, despite one of the worst reputations in the animal kingdom, believe rats make the best pets in the world.
They help prove the universal point that rats only become a problem when humans fail to take care of their urban environment.
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