This article originally appeared in the Back Bay Courant, November 3, 1998.

Unlike their more fastidious, bipedal mammalian cousins, rats don't care how their food is served. Thus while humans go out to dine, rats -- normally nocturnal, anyway -- haunt alleyways, looking for whatever garbage has been left behind.

If trash and garbage are left out overnight, it's like a CARE package for the starving. Rats sniff out the garbage, make short work of the thin plastic bags it's housed in and feast the night away.

Stopping this should be simple. Many alleys of the Back Bay are posted with signs that prohibit trash from being put out the night before trash days. When those rules are followed, it's one of the most effective means of cutting down the rat population.

But most of Boston does not have the same rules. Trash can be put out the evening before pickup. After the rats and scavengers are done doing their work, the streets are messy and filthy while the rats are larger and more numerous.

One would think that changing the rules would be simple, especially since they seem to work relatively well in the parts of the Back Bay where they have been in effect.

Well, the world is full of "one would thinks" that turn out to be simple in theory but hard in practice. This case was no exception.

Changing the rules provoked a complicated debate. It turns out that state regulation seems to allow residents to put trash out a full day before it's collected. Some within the city argued that this meant Boston had to give residents a full day or 24 hours. Indeed, it appeared for awhile that Back Bay's rules themselves might be illegal.

For a short time it also appeared that any change to the rules in Boston's neighborhoods would require the complicated process of changing state law itself. (As a side note, consider the absurdity that state law is so intrusive that cities and towns can't even tell their residents when to put out their garbage.)

Others argued that the state rules were an outside limit and that the city could enforce a shorter time period. If so, then the Commissioner of Public Works could simply issue new regulations requiring trash to be put out in the morning.

But merely suggesting that caused others within the City Council to protest. Some feared that the new rules would apply citywide, and they didn't see why the more suburban parts of Boston, like Hyde Park and West Roxbury, needed new regulations. Others feared that the elderly would not be able to wake up early enough to comply. More seriously, some observed that while pickup in the Back Bay generally occurs around nine in the morning, pickup in other neighborhoods is much earlier.

The upshot of all this is that the Council will be holding hearings shortly to look into changing the rules. Until then, the vermin will continue to run amok.