I joined an 'elite squad of anti-rat activists.' It was even creepier than I expected.

Getty Images; iStock; Natalie Ammari/BI

Andrew Barrett is hardly a rat sympathizer. He's spent years waging war on the rodents who flock to his community garden in Brooklyn, smashing the entrances to their underground burrows, tearing down the ivy that offers them cover from predators, and installing poisonous bait boxes to lure them to an untimely demise. When we met in mid-August, Barrett told me he was looking into purchasing a roughly $3,000 contraption known as the BurrowRx, which exterminators use to spray carbon monoxide into the rats' tunnels and kill them in their sleep. But even the fiercest rat antagonists can't help but reveal a smidge of admiration for the enemy.