Eric Adams is currently facing multiple federal counts of bribery and corruption, but the war on rats stops for no man. Last week, just as the mayor’s legal troubles came to a head, the City Council approved a pilot to test rat birth control in the city. “I’m not saying rat contraceptives are going to be a magic wand,” Councilmember Shaun Abreu, who sponsored the bill, told The New York Times. “But we should see if they work.”
After the beloved Eurasian owl Flaco was found dead with rat poison in his system, animal advocates called for rat birth control as a more humane way to control the city’s rat population. The bill directs the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, in consultation with the Department of Sanitation, to establish two ten-block zones where rat-birth-control pellets will be deployed and studied over at least a year. The rats that eat the pellets will go on living their lives but will no longer be able to reproduce. An approach proponents see as attacking the issue at its roots, since rats can become sexually mature in about two months and have up to 12 pups per litter.
The effectiveness of the contraceptives will depend on multiple factors, including whether the rats will eat it over, say, stale pizza in a nearby trash bag. (This isn’t the first time rat birth control has been tried and deemed a failure.) As Michael H. Parsons, a rodentologist, pointed out to us, it would only take one pair of rats who dislike the taste of the birth-control pellets to reproduce rapidly and create a huge family of pellet-hating rats. Still, a pilot is a good start — as long as the data collected is sound — and the bill directs the study to be “established in consultation with at least one expert in rodent control.” Added up with Adams’s indictment, it’s been a win-lose week for rats.
