Why are there so many chicken bones on the street? (Part 1)

Speaker 1 This week on Search Engine, a mystery that has haunted us for years.

Speaker 1 Why are there so many chicken bones on the streets? That's after some ads.

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Search Engine. I'm PJ Vote.
A few months ago, I got an unusual message from some unusual people.

Speaker 1 Why don't we start? Do you guys just want to introduce yourselves?

Speaker 2 Sure.

Speaker 4 My name is Manny.

Speaker 5 I'm Noah.

Speaker 2 I'm Devin.

Speaker 1 Manny, Noah, and Devin. They're all journalists.
Noah works at a newspaper. Manny and Devin work for a national broadcasting company called NBC.
The three of them met early in their careers.

Speaker 1 And what is your relationship to each other?

Speaker 4 We used to sit next to each other at Business Insider a long time ago and argue every day.

Speaker 1 And what would you argue about?

Speaker 4 We would argue about things like whether water is wet.

Speaker 2 A classic.

Speaker 4 What else? Oh,

Speaker 5 whether CNN puts an orange filter on Trump.

Speaker 2 You know, things like that. But just on Donald Trump.
Just on Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 So they press the Trump button when he's on.

Speaker 4 It's not a button. It's, you know, we know how to do this.
It's not like magic.

Speaker 1 But so, like, the kind of conversations people have when they're locked in a room for a really long time, whether that's like confined or like purgatory or like a job that's like not as engaging or whatever.

Speaker 1 It's just like, we're in this room all day, every day, and this is what eventually happens.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'll put it this way: the work we were doing back then was not very taxing creatively. And so I think we found ways to entertain ourselves.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 1 So normally the way the show works is like either we have questions ourselves that we go try to answer or people send in questions and then we try to answer them.

Speaker 1 You guys send an unusual email and that you're like, we've got a bunch of questions. They're really good questions.
They were really good questions. And you were like, and we want to answer them.

Speaker 2 And I was like, that seems cool. Also, normally, just to talk about what else is going on.

Speaker 6 When I put it that way, it sounds bad.

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no, it's good. It's good.
We are the experts on all of them. I can't handle this

Speaker 1 and it was funny because typically like when podcasts have like a freelance reporter it's like a freelance reporter but you guys are like no we're three people in a person suit and we want to both ask and answer the questions

Speaker 4 yeah just uh hand us the mic essentially is what we're asking three mics yeah

Speaker 2 so what question do you have for me for you to answer

Speaker 4 Our question is, why are there so many chicken bones on the street and who is the culprit?

Speaker 4 It's a a pretty simple question, but we dug into it a little bit and it turns out that there's a ton of layers to this question.

Speaker 4 The inception of the question actually started with Devin.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so me, similar to a lot of people during the pandemic, got really bored. Yep.

Speaker 2 Started fostering dogs and then I quickly started to notice how much trash there is on the streets.

Speaker 1 You never notice how disgusting the streets are until you have a dog that's trying to eat everything disgusting on the streets.

Speaker 2 And the second dog I had would like try to eat literally everything. At one point I had taken him to the vet because he ate a rat.

Speaker 1 Like an entire rat?

Speaker 2 I don't know how much of a rat because it was just the tail sticking out of his mouth.

Speaker 4 Did you try to pull it out?

Speaker 2 I just shook him a lot.

Speaker 2 I was like, you're not even really my dog. I'm just fostering you.
So I wasn't putting my hand in.

Speaker 1 It's so disgusting imagining like

Speaker 1 the end of a piece of spaghetti, just like a rat.

Speaker 2 Because I'm like, you know, dogs eat a lot of stuff on the streets, but the thing that I kept coming across were like chicken bones. Yes.
And I was like, why are there just so many chicken bones?

Speaker 2 You know, more chicken bones than dead rats.

Speaker 2 And then

Speaker 2 we talked about it. And I'm like, oh, yeah, like in all of our neighborhoods, we're noticing like just a shit ton of chicken bones on the ground.

Speaker 4 We noticed that this was an issue in our neighborhoods in Brooklyn, but we have journalism backgrounds, so we wanted to make sure that this happening to us was also happening on a larger scale.

Speaker 4 In order to confirm this, we started texting a bunch of our friends to send photos to us whenever they encountered chicken bones, just to make sure that this is happening on a broad scale.

Speaker 2 And I wanted to show you just a sample of those photos.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this is chicken bone evidence.

Speaker 4 So what happened was I think we accidentally created kind of a surveillance state of people across Brooklyn who are sending in these photos of chicken bones and encountering people who are throwing them on the ground.

Speaker 4 And when they send us these photos, they are also sending, you know, where they are when they took the photos.

Speaker 4 Either that or depending on your iPhone settings, I can click into the picture and see the metadata and see where the photo is being taken.

Speaker 1 So most of these photos are just like,

Speaker 1 it's somebody taking a picture of their sneakers on the concrete and like there's like gross, like there's like a push down Dunkin' Donuts bag and then a chicken bone.

Speaker 1 There's like two chicken bones and I think.

Speaker 4 Yeah, get in close there. One of these photos has

Speaker 4 maybe 16 bones. Yeah, just like

Speaker 1 one with a lot, a lot of bones. So because these have metadata, it's like you're also getting, because it's not like chicken bones are evenly distributed throughout New York City.

Speaker 1 You're getting a map of what are the hotspot neighborhoods neighborhoods for chicken bones among the friends you surveyed.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and it's, you know, admittedly not a gigantic sample, a big enough sample to do an official study, but I found that like generally bedstein crown heights have a more concentrated,

Speaker 4 you know, proliferation of chicken bones on the street.

Speaker 2 Well, I'd also say...

Speaker 5 So we wanted to expand it to see like, is this just a New York thing?

Speaker 5 So we did search and like, if you search just like chicken bones on street you'll find like every major city's reddit has at least a few threads on this issue um so it happens everywhere yeah it happens everywhere people gather in cities yeah it seems like any dense area is going to have someone complaining about chicken bones on the street and is it usually dog owners yeah typically it's people complaining because their dogs are eating them there were some tick tocks we found too that are about this issue yeah we can play one of these

Speaker 7 on tick tock stop throwing your fucking chicken bones on the ground i can't keep fighting with my dog every fucking morning.

Speaker 1 This person's prying their tiny Pomeranian's mouth open trying to get chicken bones out of it. And that has 75,000 favorites.
So, this is a thing that people are feeling.

Speaker 4 Yeah, this is real.

Speaker 1 Okay, so coming up after a short break, this real thing, this plague of chicken bones in American cities, who's behind it?

Speaker 2 We'll investigate.

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Speaker 4 So once we confirmed that this chicken bones thing was a real problem and has been for years in multiple American cities, the three of us began our investigation into this question.

Speaker 4 Why are there so many chicken bones on the street?

Speaker 4 And we divvied up the work into three prongs.

Speaker 1 And who took what prong and what are the prongs?

Speaker 4 Each one of us has like a thing we're kind of good with, if you will. We're going to start with Noah.
He's like a nerd. He really dug into the history of chicken consumption in general.

Speaker 4 So we'll start with him.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so my job was to look into why there are so many chickens that then turn into bones. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Okay, so why are there so many chickens?

Speaker 5 So I went way back and pretty deep on this to like the first domesticated chickens, which would be in modern day, what would now be like Central Texas.

Speaker 2 I was trying to say I really appreciate the depth of research on this. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Did a lot of reading this weekend.

Speaker 1 Okay, so wait, so the first domesticated chickens are when and where?

Speaker 5 So the first unambiguous domestic chicken bones, that's kind of the term they use in this recent research I've been looking at, they're dated to around 1650 to 1250 BC in central Thailand.

Speaker 5 There's some debate about other regions, but the theory is basically wild jungle fowl were drawn there by rice agriculture.

Speaker 1 I never would have pictured that there was a wild version of a chicken, but of course there was a wild version of a chicken.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and if you look them up, they're actually pretty beautiful little creatures. They're like, there's red ones, gray ones, different colors.

Speaker 2 It's like Pokemon. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 5 It seems like they were attracted to the rice because it's like easier to just live off grains other people are growing and you can stay in one area and that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 So they wander in and get domesticated.

Speaker 5 Exactly. So then people would take them in or whatever.
And those are the first kind of domesticated chickens is the theory.

Speaker 5 Then it's like they spread from there across South Asia, Mesopotamia, Europe, and Africa. They're not really primarily raised for their meat.
It's it's really much more they're kind of novelties.

Speaker 5 They're sent along trade routes as like gifts for royalty. In this time, they kind of develop different sorts of associations.

Speaker 5 So like in Japan and China, they're associated with sun gods, which makes sense because they'll crow in the morning. Right.
So they'll start the day.

Speaker 5 In ancient Greece, they were associated with lots of medical uses. So like the chicken would be taken apart and all different parts of it would be used in different medicines.

Speaker 5 And you can see stuff like that today in like chicken soup that we have. It's kind of a cure-all.

Speaker 1 That idea traces back to the idea that chicken is like a medical cure.

Speaker 5 Yeah, exactly. And then today in like vaccines, they use egg protein.
So like certain people can't have flu vaccines because it's eggs in them. So chickens are kind of associated with medicine.

Speaker 4 And some people can't have them because of the 5G chip.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's just the thing.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's correct. And fact check.

Speaker 1 But it's like if today the thing about the chicken is that it's ubiquitous, in the moment that you're describing it, they're not ubiquitous.

Speaker 1 And so it's like, they're serving a lot of different functions. But one of the things that they have in common is that chickens are rare.

Speaker 1 And so a chicken is traveling along this trade route because it's a gift from somewhere else that means something different depending on who's receiving it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 5 And now we're going to fast forward a few thousand years to America. Sure.
There's some debate. The main theory is that Christopher Columbus brought them in, you know, 1493.

Speaker 5 There's also a theory that Polynesians brought them. when that would have been about a hundred years earlier.

Speaker 1 But at this point, are they coming because they're a source of food, not because they're an exotic gift.

Speaker 5 Yeah, that's more just like, okay, these are good animals we could eat. Yes.
And they made it over because they're hardy animals, so they could survive a passage like that.

Speaker 5 So they were good as an option for food. And then getting forward to like the 20th century, pedigree chicken breeding begins.

Speaker 5 And this is kind of when the commercial broiler chicken comes around in 1923. And that's a broiler chicken is a chicken raised for meat and not for eggs or other things.

Speaker 5 So this is really those, like when you picture a chicken dinner, that's the broiler chicken.

Speaker 1 So it's like we're turning chickens from something wild to something domesticated to something that is almost an industrial product. And as that happens, they become more popular in America.

Speaker 5 Yeah, exactly. And then that's in the 20s.
And then it kind of develops pretty quickly from there. The main touch point is World War II.
There's rations on beef, pork, and lamb.

Speaker 5 So the government then encourages way more chickens to be raised and eaten to kind of make up for that.

Speaker 5 So by the end of the war, there's three times more chicken being eaten than there was before, which is a pretty huge kind of immediate jump in just a few years.

Speaker 5 But then the war is over, so everyone can have their beef and pork back. And then people aren't really that into chicken still.

Speaker 5 It's like, yeah, we ate that during the war because we had to, but we can kind of go back to the good food now. Yes.

Speaker 5 So the government's like, okay, we have all these chickens and no one wants to eat them.

Speaker 5 Or like, we know we can make all these chickens and they're really cheap to make because of all these other things. But how do you make people eat them? Exactly.

Speaker 5 So there is actually a contest called the Chicken of Tomorrow Contest, which was sponsored by the USDA and the ANP grocery store chain in 1948.

Speaker 5 And the whole contest was set up to encourage farmers to develop bigger, better chickens.

Speaker 5 And there's like a very good government-made and Texaco-sponsored documentary, which I can show you some flips of.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Besides being a good egg layer, the chicken of tomorrow will be an improved meat producer.

Speaker 1 Oh, so there's the chicken of today next to the chicken of tomorrow. And the chicken of today is much, I mean, it's a carcass, but it's much skinnier.

Speaker 2 Notice how breeding has increased the amount of meat on the breast.

Speaker 2 Look at that drumstick. Oh, man.

Speaker 1 The chicken on the right looks like the chickens you're used to, and the chicken on the left looks like a chicken that's never lifted weights.

Speaker 2 Make your own guess as to which is the more profitable to raise.

Speaker 4 I have to say, it's kind of working on me.

Speaker 2 I mean, look how chicken

Speaker 2 it looks to me.

Speaker 2 And when the chicken of tomorrow gets to the dinner table, its advantages are still more apparent.

Speaker 3 This video, from the perspective of chickens, is just really dark.

Speaker 5 Yeah, the overall quality of life definitely seems to go down from like the days of being kind of gods of the sun.

Speaker 5 But there's more of them.

Speaker 5 They're like Jack now, which is also cool.

Speaker 2 That's true.

Speaker 2 So bleak.

Speaker 3 Okay, so what happens now?

Speaker 5 So chickens are much bigger now. And then this is when big name brands emerge.
So Tyson, Purdue, et cetera.

Speaker 5 And there's kind of a real commercial chicken industry and then fast food comes along so KFC and later McDonald's so by the time we're in the late 70s 80s we're at the point where chickens are starting to catch up with other meats.

Speaker 1 Okay, so 80s is when it starts to become like fast food fried chicken, which I'm assuming is where like it really takes off.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah. So like today worldwide, there's 74 billion chickens a year raised and slaughtered for food.

Speaker 5 And like that's even risen so much in 2000 that was 40 billion, that number.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 1 it went from 40 billion in 2000 to 74 billion today.

Speaker 1 When you describe it like that, it's almost surprising that every street isn't just fully knee-high and like a macabre red carpet of chicken bones.

Speaker 5 I did a quick number crunch, and there's about 120 bones in the chicken.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 5 if you do 120 times 74 billion, I believe this would be 8.88 trillion bones per year.

Speaker 2 Per year. Yeah.
Available to be on the ground. Available.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 So honestly, the real question is: why are there not more chicken bones?

Speaker 5 Yeah,

Speaker 5 we should be tripping over them.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Okay, so we have like a history of the chickens' popularity to humankind from 1600 BC to today,

Speaker 1 which is like the prerequisite for how you get streets filled with chicken bones. What is the next prong here?

Speaker 4 So the next prong here is we come back to the question. And now we begin to look at the suspects.
Who is throwing these bones on the street?

Speaker 4 Our first and leading suspect is human beings. Right.

Speaker 4 Lots of accusations online with people saying this.

Speaker 4 People are eating their chicken wings, legs, thighs, whatever. All of the chicken wings.
And then discarding the bones on the ground when they're done with them. That's what the allegation is.

Speaker 4 That has been my assumption. Yeah.
And I, Manny, was responsible for this part of the investigation because I think I'm kind of skilled at surveillance in a way.

Speaker 2 He's very nosy.

Speaker 4 So, in order to kind of confirm whether or not this was happening, I asked a bunch of friends of mine to send me photos of when people are doing this in real time, eating chicken bones.

Speaker 1 You guys, your friends to do like chicken steakouts.

Speaker 5 Chicken steakouts, exactly.

Speaker 1 And how does a chicken steak out work? Do you sit outside of a chicken place? Do you sit in a like a cruiser? Like what do you do?

Speaker 4 So I personally sat outside of a couple of chicken places on Fulton Street.

Speaker 4 Couldn't find anyone, unfortunately, but I did get a text message from my friend Ray who saw a woman eating chicken wings in her driver's seat of her car and then throwing the bones out onto the street.

Speaker 4 And I'll show you that text message right there at the top left.

Speaker 1 Okay, so this is exhibit A.

Speaker 5 It's a photo.

Speaker 1 All you can actually see is a parked car, but the text underneath says, she's parked, eating chicken wings. And then you say, and throwing them out? I need video if possible.

Speaker 5 The leading question.

Speaker 1 And then Dre says, ugh, my pics scared her, and she left.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and I want to show you the photo that's just above that that didn't fit into that.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah,

Speaker 2 that's a good shot. Okay, so there's...

Speaker 1 There's four, and they look almost like shell casings of the crime scene. But there's four chicken bones on the street.
Oh, and then below is the, the, the photo of the car.

Speaker 1 And I will say, like, I feel like as like, I don't know what we are, but like,

Speaker 1 I feel like a bias among like progressive journalists is like when there's a problem, you're kind of like, well, it's not people. It's like structures and systems.

Speaker 1 I've seen people do disgusting stuff in New York City. I've seen people litter.
I've stepped in human feces on the street.

Speaker 1 Like, if the answer that you have found in your reporting is there's actually enough people who just genuinely don't give a shit. And those people happen to eat a lot of chicken.

Speaker 1 And like, it's like a small amount of people are causing this entire problem.

Speaker 2 I'm open to believing that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, well, that's where I started. That was my question.
I'm, like you just said, I consider myself the average lefty liberal who cares about the environment.

Speaker 4 And so when my friend Rey sent me this photo, I was like, why the hell would someone eat it in their car and then throw it right there onto the ground?

Speaker 1 Wait, and can I also say another thing? First of all, just to, because I don't want to make assumptions about you guys, do you guys litter?

Speaker 2 No. No.
No.

Speaker 1 And when you say you don't litter, would you throw an apple core on the ground? No.

Speaker 2 I don't really eat apples, so I can't, I can't see.

Speaker 5 I could see, I mean, I don't drive.

Speaker 2 If I was driving on the highway and then there's not an apple on the ground. If I'm driving in there,

Speaker 5 no, listen, and there's woods to my right, say.

Speaker 2 I'm driving somewhere, a long drive, long haul drive.

Speaker 5 I would throw that out.

Speaker 2 Because you're crazy.

Speaker 6 And it's not, that's not, people aren't walking around there.

Speaker 4 I guess there's an argument to be made that if the thing you're discarding is

Speaker 4 biodegradable, who are you really harming?

Speaker 2 I think we

Speaker 1 have to be like when you say it's biodegradable, like I definitely have a memory.

Speaker 1 I'm not going to say who else is in the memory, but I remember being young, getting like the no littering rule drilled into my head and then being around an adult, watching them litter, being like, what?

Speaker 1 And they're like, it's biodegradable.

Speaker 2 I think I learned about the concept of biodegradable. Totally.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 And I will say, if I was driving down a highway,

Speaker 1 And there was a cops of trees to my left and driving all day, eating apples.

Speaker 2 Eating apples. How long are we driving? Where are you going?

Speaker 2 It's a long drive. It's a long way.
And the only restaurants are apple restaurants.

Speaker 2 I can imagine a world where you're like, okay, why the hell? It's biodegradable. There will be an apple tree next time I drive by here in 30 years.

Speaker 5 Otherwise, you have this sticky apple core sitting next to you.

Speaker 6 And it's brown. And you still have hours to go.

Speaker 2 Can you not stop it? We've got a long way to go. You can't stop you.

Speaker 4 This is like speed.

Speaker 2 Where it just slows down at the car.

Speaker 5 You're in big trouble.

Speaker 2 If I'm in the bus in the movie speed, then yes, I will throw it out the window.

Speaker 1 But I could imagine a world where like the it's biodegradable idea travels up the food chain a little bit and there's somebody or somebody or lots of people throwing chicken bones on the ground and be like, they're biodegradable.

Speaker 2 I don't think they

Speaker 5 looked into that a little bit to see like how long it would take for it to

Speaker 1 biodegrade. And how long does it take?

Speaker 5 Longer than even like composting, it takes a little bit, a couple weeks. That's within like the soil and like it's set up to do that.

Speaker 5 If you're just throwing it on the street, it's I think it would take a, I don't know, I don't have a number for you, but longer than an Apple Core.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 So I'm going to bring us back to my surveillance. I got these photos of this woman throwing chicken bones onto the street and I was honestly kind of stupefied.

Speaker 4 And so I went onto Google and I tried to find studies as to why people would do this.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 The leading kind of theory is that people throw things on the ground, people litter because there aren't enough enough trash cans around.

Speaker 4 And actually, like they put it in a specific way, which was that the strongest indicator that someone will litter is their distance to a trash can.

Speaker 4 So I decided to walk around my neighborhood and count the trash cans.

Speaker 4 There are, I might have missed a couple, there are at least 20 trash cans.

Speaker 4 I was surprised. When I read the study, I was like, all right, there's going to be like six trash cans out here.
That's why everyone's throwing their wings on the ground. I walked by.

Speaker 4 Maybe this is not up to snuff. Maybe there should be more trash cans.
But in my opinion, 20 is enough for you not to throw your garbage on the ground.

Speaker 4 And in many cases, a lot of these chicken bones are next to trash cans.

Speaker 1 Oh, so people are just making a choice here.

Speaker 4 If it were human beings doing this, if they were the most likely culprit, this person would be walking up to a trash can and then throwing the wings on the ground next to the trash can.

Speaker 1 Okay, wait, so just to follow, because one way you could take this is if the academic research is saying people are less likely to litter when a lot of trash cans are around and you're seeing tons of trash cans and tons of chicken bones, it's like either you have to decide that the academic littering research is wrong or you're deciding something additional or something else is going on here.

Speaker 5 And where you're going is something else is going on here.

Speaker 4 Yeah, either people who live in Brooklyn are worse human beings than everyone else in the United States, which there's tons of evidence for.

Speaker 2 There is a lot of evidence of that to be fair, or

Speaker 4 it's not humans, something else is causing all of these bones

Speaker 4 to be all over the ground.

Speaker 1 More after a break.

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Speaker 2 Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 4 We've now arrived at the next prong of this investigation. This whole question came from Devin being a dog owner and encountering chicken bones everywhere.

Speaker 4 And so Devin's specialty, so to speak, here, is animals. We're calling him the Wrangler.

Speaker 2 So yeah, you know, like our idea now

Speaker 2 is that it's not humans. So there must be something going into the trash and taking out the bones.
So like, who's doing that?

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Some type of animal. Yes.

Speaker 4 And in fact, one of these photos, I'll point you to the photo here in the middle. You will see a trash bag.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's a trash bag with an opening and a little thing. It's been chewed open.

Speaker 4 It's been chewed open and there's trash coming out of it.

Speaker 3 I see where you guys are going with this, but proceed.

Speaker 2 So a lot of theories, you know, we kind of combed through the redded threads and kind of went one by one with all the different animals. So we'll start with squirrels.

Speaker 1 Okay, not where I was thinking.

Speaker 2 We'll get there. We'll get there.
We'll start with squirrels, though.

Speaker 2 So there are some first-hand accounts um of people saying hey i was blaming people i was walking my dog and i looked up i actually saw a squirrel drop a bone

Speaker 2 let me pull up this quote because it was pretty funny um

Speaker 2 nelson who owns a yellow labrador admits that she had for some time also pointed fingers at her neighbors for their serious threat to her pooch.

Speaker 2 It was like, oh my god, who's throwing their chicken bones on the the ground?

Speaker 2 She says, not until just a bone literally fell out of a tree right in front of her did it occur to her that squirrels might often be to blame.

Speaker 1 That's so funny. It's funny because it's like we live in a way where we think so little about nature that the idea that nature could be causing these problems is not even like on the menu of ideas.

Speaker 3 Like you're like, obviously people are screwing me over.

Speaker 1 And it's like, no, the squirrels might be doing something.

Speaker 2 And maybe the squirrels.

Speaker 2 Oh, there's some good video online of squirrels like gnawing on chicken bones. It seems like, you know, it's a thing.

Speaker 2 So then we were like, all right, but like, we don't see that many squirrels in New York. No.
Right. So there's actually these people who do like a squirrel census.
There's a squirrel census.

Speaker 2 There's a squirrel census.

Speaker 3 How do you get them to answer the surveys?

Speaker 2 Don't get them to answer the surveys.

Speaker 2 So the last time they did it, you know, it's a few years old now, but it was in 2020, March of 2020. Wow, they didn't even think about that.
They were like, the world's shutting down.

Speaker 2 Only essential workers and the squirrel census people are allowed out of that. All the squirrels left New York.

Speaker 4 Yeah, no, I actually.

Speaker 2 I'm going upstate. More space.
There were 72 volunteers that went to 24 parks in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Do you want to guess how many squirrels they counted?

Speaker 2 Because I thought it was kind of like insane.

Speaker 4 I think I want you to guess the number. How many squirrels do you think they counted?

Speaker 1 Okay, in how many parks?

Speaker 1 24 parks. And over how many days no just just one day a couple hours one day 24 parks couple hours how many volunteers 72.
i'm so bad at math i can't even count chilling

Speaker 2 uh

Speaker 2 a thousand squirrels 433.

Speaker 1 oh there's really not a lot of squirrels yeah it doesn't that seem really low It does, except for that, like in New York City, I'm like, there's no living nature whatsoever.

Speaker 2 But that does seem very low. Yeah, like there's not enough squirrels.

Speaker 2 You know, if people are like actively going to parks and looking for hours and they only counted 433, it's like, it's not enough to be causing the amount of bones, which is the same thing.

Speaker 1 Because of the parks are their domain more so than like Franklin Avenue.

Speaker 2 You're not seeing them like just on the street. Like it's, you know, my dog doesn't love, well, he loves squirrels.
So like I notice when they're around. Yes.
And it's not that often. Yes.

Speaker 2 Which brings us to suspect number two.

Speaker 2 Raccoons. You know, they have little hands.

Speaker 2 So maybe they're a little better at getting bones out of the trash. There's this random article from the New York Times

Speaker 2 in 1975 that they were talking about how like raccoons actually really enjoy chicken bones. Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah, according to this article, like if you give raccoons scraps of food, the first thing they go after is like chicken, and that's including the bones.

Speaker 1 Raccoons have a preference for chicken lungs.

Speaker 1 That's such a weird thing to know now.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 4 Was this article from 1975?

Speaker 2 The article was from 1975, and it was just like,

Speaker 1 what was the news value in being like, what do raccoons like to eat more than the other things they like to eat? Like, why were they trying to figure this out?

Speaker 5 Several times, yes.

Speaker 2 Really?

Speaker 2 They're like, Vietnam War is happening.

Speaker 1 The moon landing was relatively recent.

Speaker 2 What we really have to get to the bottom is what do raccoons like to eat the most?

Speaker 2 But I have literally never seen a raccoon in New York City.

Speaker 1 So, right.

Speaker 2 It couldn't possibly be a raccoon. So, that brings us to suspect number three, which is birds.

Speaker 3 I still feel like there's an animal that

Speaker 2 there's maybe

Speaker 2 more obvious. But okay, birds.
Let's walk through birds. Let's go through birds.
Yeah. You know, can't you?

Speaker 4 I have personally seen a pigeon pick at chicks.

Speaker 2 Yes, I have too. Oh, birds will eat bird.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 1 That's disgusting.

Speaker 2 Pigeons will, and you know, crows and ravens would seem more likely because, you know, they eat meat.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, the problem a little bit with the bird on bird theory is that the bones are being found.
It sounds like near the restaurants.

Speaker 1 And my assumption, and maybe I'm wrong, but like my assumption is like the crow would grab the thing and like fly away.

Speaker 2 Yes. So that was, that's when we were looking into it.
A lot of people were saying, you know, there's some people who feed crows and like crows come to their windows. Yeah.
This is big on TikTok.

Speaker 2 And people were saying like, oh, my crows sometimes bring me bones as like gifts. Oh, wow.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 But to your point, right? It's like where we're seeing most of the stuff is like on sidewalks, usually where where trash is.

Speaker 2 So, like, if a crow was picking up something from there, I wouldn't just drop it in the crow does like takeout.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you want someone who's eating in.

Speaker 2 Yes. Yeah.
Exactly. Which leads us to lions.

Speaker 2 I feel like there's like just people who've been like screaming rat at their like iPhone for like four minutes. We could do more on pigeons.

Speaker 2 Hold on, hold on, dude.

Speaker 2 Yeah, rats, rats, right? Like, so rats are yeah, yeah. So that's our leading theory is that it's rats.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And they're basically just digging in because part of the problem with New York City is we don't have alleys.

Speaker 1 And so all trash goes out onto the street, which would also explain why, because like people are eating chicken in the suburbs, but the suburban streets are not filled with chicken bones, as far as I know.

Speaker 1 That is what is different about here, besides density, is how we throw out our trash.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 1 So people eat chicken. Many of them are not littering.
They throw it in the trash. There's There's a little bit of meat on it.
The rats go into the bag. The rats pull the bones out.

Speaker 1 They pick it clean. They leave it on the street.
Is that the...

Speaker 2 That is the theory.

Speaker 1 Interesting. Okay, but here's a question of that theory.
Why then are chicken bones unevenly distributed? Because rats in New York City neighborhoods, I think, are kind of evenly distributed, right?

Speaker 2 Yes and no, right? So I would say to Manny's point earlier, some neighborhoods are better about taking care of their garbage than others, right?

Speaker 2 And the way that some neighborhoods even, you know, get rid of their garbage is not the same as others.

Speaker 2 So I think the big problem with the neighborhoods that have more chicken bones is that mostly they're throwing out their trash by just putting plastic bags on the street versus like a container that's being picked up.

Speaker 2 So there's a little bit of a backstory here with plastic trash bags in New York City. Okay.
So a lot of the big apartment buildings for years, they would just burn their trash. Oh.

Speaker 2 But then there was the Clean Air Act in 1970, and they're like, yeah, you can't burn trash anymore.

Speaker 2 And then around the same time, plastic bags were becoming a thing.

Speaker 1 What was it before plastic bags?

Speaker 2 So they, you know, like the Oscar the Grouch, sort of like trash cans.

Speaker 1 Oh, and the trash would just go directly into the Oscars.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so people would take their trash, put it directly in there. If there were bags, there would be like paper bags.
Yeah. You know, those break apart.
That's wild.

Speaker 2 So yeah, people would just put, you know, raw garbage

Speaker 2 in a can.

Speaker 1 Interesting.

Speaker 2 And they switched over to plastic because they're like, these things are loud. Yeah.
It's really gross to have to clean out, right?

Speaker 2 If you're just putting garbage directly into that can and then like you're just responsible for getting the remnants out. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And it was really slow for trash people to pick up the trash because they had to go to everybody. can

Speaker 1 empty it out shake it bang it right interesting okay so

Speaker 1 if you guys are right rats are the culprit and it is kind of like a structural problem. It's like how the city is set up.
It's how trash works in the city. So how do you test the theory?

Speaker 2 I'm glad you asked.

Speaker 2 Great question.

Speaker 4 We actually have experiments that we're going to pitch that we think might prove that rats are the culprit for the amount of chicken bones that are on the streets in Brooklyn.

Speaker 1 So what are the experiments?

Speaker 2 Number one is we go around and we pick up chicken bones off the street that we're seeing and we send them off to a lab.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 We try to see if the lab can identify if there's rat DNA on the chicken bones.

Speaker 1 So they're looking for like rat saliva particles?

Speaker 2 Yes. We could test all the other animals as well.

Speaker 2 See what we found, dude.

Speaker 1 Okay, so one possibility is laboratory testing, which Search Engine always likes.

Speaker 2 What else is there?

Speaker 4 We also thought about

Speaker 1 getting a bag of chicken wings and just putting them out on my sidewalk and setting up a GoPro that was my assumption and you put like night vision on the thing and you wait to see if you're making a feast for rats that's right okay I like that one I feel like what's funny is someone will end up writing a complaint where they'll be like my neighbor's trying to kill my dog you put yourself

Speaker 4 that's the one thing i am afraid of is if i'll cause an influx of rats in the area that might come back the next day expecting more chicken to be there i don't know how smart they are rats don't travel very far.

Speaker 2 Around 600 feet. So the rats you see every day are the same rats.

Speaker 4 Those are the guys. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Those are the dudes.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 3 This is good pseudoscience.

Speaker 2 I like all of these.

Speaker 1 Noah the Brain, Manny the Snoop, and Devin the Wrangler. You can follow their adventures at their website, Manny NoahDevin, D-E-V-A-N.com.
And next week, they will be back on Search Engine.

Speaker 1 Our investigators will return. We will dip into the perilously low search engine discretionary budget to rent some GoPros from Alex Gibney and bait them with premium Brooklyn chicken wings.

Speaker 3 I'm headed downstairs to set up this GoPro. Oh,

Speaker 4 oh, that stick is for hitting the rats.

Speaker 7 That's crazy.

Speaker 2 Okay, I found the bag. Oh my god, and I found chicken bones.

Speaker 2 Oh my God.

Speaker 1 All this in the service of bringing you an answer.

Speaker 1 A real answer, not some mealy-mouthed podcaster crap about the friends we made along the way, or how the hot sauce and sushi is a metaphor for like Occam's razor or something. No,

Speaker 5 we're going to find out if the rats did it.

Speaker 3 And if so, they're going to jail.

Speaker 1 That's next week on Search Engine. Armin, play the music.

Speaker 3 This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Perfectly Snug. You ever notice how a bad night of sleep just wrecks your whole day?

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Speaker 1 Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey and Jigsaw Productions. It was created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruti Pinamanani and is produced by Garrett Graham and Noah John.
Fact-checking by Cinta Taylor.

Speaker 1 Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bazarian. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Leah Reese Dennis.

Speaker 1 Thanks to the team at Jigsaw, Alex Gibney, Rich Pirello, and John Schmidt. And to the team at Odyssey, J.D.

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Thank you for listening.

Speaker 1 We will be back with the finale of this story next week.