A second emergency rat cull in the municipality of Centar within two months. Not the regular spring treatment, not the autumn one coming up - an emergency round, for the second time, prompted by a rise in rodents and reports from residents. The operation runs today and tomorrow in Bunjakovec, Kapištec, Gradski zid and other critical locations.

Centar mayor Goran Gerasimovski said out loud what everyone reading this already knows: rat culls do not solve the problem.

"This is the second emergency treatment in the last two months. Before that we had the regular spring round, and the autumn one is ahead of us. But treatment alone does not solve the problem," he said, calling on the City of Skopje and the city public utilities to empty and maintain the bins regularly and to maintain the sewerage infrastructure.

The bait is a consequence, not a measure

The arithmetic is simple and needs no expert. Rodents go where there is food and shelter. An overflowing bin is food. Unsealed sewerage is shelter. Poison laid over both reduces neither - it only reduces the number of rodents that find them, until the next generation.

Gerasimovski is also right that the problem is not confined to one municipality but is wider, and that it needs a systemic approach with all the competent institutions. That is true. It is also the most convenient sentence a mayor can utter, because it distributes responsibility across so many addresses that in the end there is none.

Which is why the question is worth asking concretely: how many times a week are the bins in Bunjakovec and Kapištec emptied? When was the sewerage network on those streets last serviced? If an answer exists, it ends the debate. If it does not, then a second emergency cull in two months is not an unexpected event - it is a schedule.

The municipality is calling on residents to report such occurrences so that action can be taken in time. Residents are already doing that - it was their reports that triggered this operation. The question is not whether people report. The question is what happens to a report once it clears the threshold for poison.