Birth Control Could Help Manage Rats in NYC, New Bill Suggests
The bill aims for safer and humane alternatives for rat control, and hopes to protect the city’s wildlife who can be killed by eating poisoned rats - including Flaco the Owl who died back in February.
Rats in New York City could be humanely managed by contraceptive pills, according to a new bill introduced last week.
The legislation will establish a pilot program to deploy rat contraceptives to see how effective such a method would be in helping to control the city’s rat population.
Introduced by Councilmember Shaun Abreu (D-Manhattan), the bill hopes to provide a safer alternative to current management methods which include exterminating rats by deadly poisons and snap and glue traps.
Animal welfare groups say that such extermination methods are cruel. Glue traps cause rats slow and agonizing deaths, while poisons make the rodents bleed internally.
Another consequence of the widespread use of rat poison is its unintended impact on wildlife. When birds and other wildlife eat poisoned rats, its dangerous effects can pass on throughout the food chain.
This issue received renewed attention earlier this year when a well-known owl named Flaco, who lived freely in the city after escaping Central Park Zoo, died after traumatic injuries from flying into a building. However, his post-mortem necropsy report found “exposure to four different anticoagulant rodenticides”, which would have been fatal regardless and may have predisposed him into flying into the building.
Flaco the owl. Credit: Julie Larsen Maher/Wildlife Conservation Society
As a result, Councilmember Abreu’s newly-introduced bill is dubbed “Flaco’s Law”, and hopes to help lower the rate of poison and pesticide used to tackle NYC’s rat problem.
“We can’t poison our way out of this, we cannot kill our way out of this,” Abreu told local news outlets.
The bill comes alongside this week’s other rat-related news, which saw NYC Mayor Eric Adams anoint the city’s first-ever ‘Rat Czar’. The role’s sole focus is to target rat reduction throughout the city, including new technologies to exterminate rat populations.
There is concern that the new Czar role will rely on increasing extermination, but Flaco’s Law highlights how more humane solutions like contraceptives may not only be possible, but prove more effective too.
“This is not a problem we can kill our way out of,” Jakob Shaw, a special project manager for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said in a statement on Flaco’s Law. “It’s time to embrace these more common sense and humane methods.”
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