On giving birth control to rats

🌟 Editor's Note

I am not a pest management expert. But I did, um, write a book on them. One where I ended up doing a lot of research into rat poisons and rat control methods that did not actually make it into the book! So. Here’s some of it!

Let them have birth control!

Washington, DC recently announced a renewed effort to fight its rat problem. And according to the headlines, they’re doing it with ratty birth control.

Or at least you would think so, according to these headlines.

And I get why, I do. Rat birth control is inherently interesting! It’s kind of fun! I mean, you picture rats taking little pills or getting lectures on how to put a condom on a tiny banana.

And the rats will be getting birth control, and if this rodent control surge works, the birth control will get the credit.

But it will not be the birth control that did the trick.

Reducing rat packs

First, it’s no secret DC has a legendary rat problem. Heck, this is the shirt I’m wearing right now:

Many, many local friends have told me of their rat woes. I know people who’ve had rats literally run into their feet as they’re walking. I’ve seen loads (some great rat sighting spots around Eastern Market, but I would say Adams Morgan and NoMA is the best rat spotting).

And of course, to go with it, there are attempts to make them go away. Every business establishment has their share of discreet black boxes around the perimeter. Those boxes are loaded with bait. Bait which is usually poisoned with a second generation anticoagulant rodenticide.

Give the number of rats, and the frequent dusty, busted state of the boxes…I’m sure that method is going totally to plan.

That is the usual method, bait stations placed around, and the more rats, the more bait stations.

But it has some drawbacks:

• If food is plentiful enough, rats have no incentive to go into a bait station and eat bait, no matter how nice it smells

• Rats are afraid of novelty, and often will not try bait in the first place, and if it makes them feel bad, but does not kill them…will never touch it, or anything that looks like it, again.

• Other things can eat the bait, including squirrels. And predators that eat poisoned rats end up with that poison in their systems, to deadly effect. It’s estimated right now that 100% of hawks in NYC have rat poison in their veins.

• Many people really hate the idea of poisoning anything, even rats.

So people are always looking for alternatives, and birth control sounds nice. Many humans take it, we know it’s safe. It sounds humane!

Teach rodents to wrap it up?

But rats are rats, not people. And birth control, currently, is not designed to work well with rats. Much like in humans, for it to work, rats need to eat a dose of the birth control every day. Rats can reproduce once every three weeks, and can even become pregnant while nursing another litter. Taking a day off their meds is not an option.

In very limited environments, like a closed warehouse, this might be possible. If the rats only have one water source, for example, put the birth control in there. If there’s only one food source, put it near there. When rat birth control works on its own, it’s often in environments like this.

A city? Not a closed warehouse. Much like with rat bait stations filled with poison, most city rats have abundant food options. They are unlikely to try the bait unless it’s very, very good, and less likely to eat it every 24 hours as prescribed.

Many cities have talked about deploying rodent birth control. It often debuts with fanfare.

But to my knowledge, no one has ever declared victory with birth control alone.

Why the DC plan might work anyway

To be clear, DC rat people are no fools. They know full well birth control alone will do nothing. Even the news articles note that poisoned bait as usual will be deployed, but if you look at the actual announcement from the city? It’s way more than that:

Every time you read “anticoagulant” in there, replace it in your mind with “rat poison.” Because that’s what it is (and yes, if you have ever taken an anticoagulant for health reasons, sometimes called a “blood thinner”? Those were developed out of rat poison. Really! I should write about that sometime…). So they will have the bait placed in active burrows (you think this is people delicately placing bait in holes, and sometimes it is, but a lot of times it’s just spreading bait chunks all over the park). And they will also deploy tracking powder, which is a cute name for something that no one is tracking anything with. It’s a sticky powder full of rat poison, that gets on the animal’s fur, and then when the rats groom themselves or each other…welp there it is.

And then of course, the birth control. Indeed, if they surviving rats eat it, it will indeed stop them from making babies. For a while. But if they’re still alive once the treatment stops…well we are all back where we started.

It might work! Especially if the city is also quite serious about giving residences and businesses good, SOLID trashcans, and insisting those trashcans NOT be stuffed over. If they take care to keep the streets clean, and best of all, help people who are unhoused to get safe, clean housing, where they aren’t forced to eat and live their lives in ways that cannot help but attract rats (DC also has a very large unhoused population and has had, many of them veterans, some of them living within sight of the White House, and yes, that’s as awful as you think it is, and yes, they were there in all the previous administrations too).

But…well that’s not listed in their plans. Good sanitation and good housing costs far more than a few weeks of baits, no matter what is in the bait.

And so they are going to poison their way out of the problem. And if it works (I do hope that it does), it’s the birth control that may get the credit.

🦄 Where have I been?

Well, this newsletters become somewhat monthly, at best. In part that’s because I’ve been trying to focus on work that makes, er, actual money. And so, here it is! The work that made me money recently!

• Well ok this one didn’t, but thanks to Jason Bittel for asking me about rat resilience for Big Think! Check out what it is that makes rats so incredibly capable of staying in our business.

• Winter might be a tough time to get outside, and spring can be unpredictable. But you know what you can do as rain lashes the windows? Watch NEST CAMS. Including bald eagle nest cams! Nature, red in tooth and claw…but also surprisingly sweet.

• Did you know that after a meal a hummingbird has a blood sugar of 757mg/dL. That’s enough to land a human in the hospital. How do they do it? Some sweet genetic tricks.

• Humans might think we know about commitment, with wedding rings and vows. But the wood eating cockroach puts us all to shame. Mated couples gently chew each other’s wings off, and are two against the world from then on out.

• We know that dogs have been certainly buddy buddy with people for 10,000 years…but a new finding put that back another 5,000 years! Which in turns puts the actual domestication of dogs back even further than that.

🔥 What have I been reading?

• You know how if you put your tongue on a freezing cold pole it'll stick?
  It is called "tundra tongue.” And there's RESEARCH about it. With images of disembodied pig tongues that you will never unsee, thank you.

• “We took the sensor out of the chamber, and we were like, ‘Screw it. We’re going to try to measure a fart.’” So Hall stuck the device down his own pants and let rip. “And the signal was enormous.” A pants fart sensor. I’m dying.

• Teens are turning to AI for nutrition advice, and the advice is not good. I cannot help but be reminded of the horrible advice I got from teen magazines, like how you could just have grapefruit for breakfast and a half an apple for lunch.

• Nuthatches coat the edges of their nests in sap! And it keeps out bugs and potentially other birds. Clever birds, so clever.

• A possum (not an opossum! Different critters) was found nestled in amongst the stuffed toys in a gift shop in Australia and I’m ABSOLUTELY SURE this is how a new invasion of possums begins. “The possum arrived in the US disguised as a children’s toy, and bought Duty Free…and now the hordes of marsupials cost the country millions of dollars a year…”

Header image credit: Photo by Amee Fairbank-Brown on Unsplash