The tales of New York City's rats are legendary. NY Rats are big and smart, and they have lots of babies. The city has a rat czar and recently held a rat summit to discuss the issue. Mayor Eric Adams was undoubtedly happy to talk about the rat problem rather than his own issues.
As much as everyone loved Pizza Rat and Donut Rat, the approximately 3 million rats in the city can carry a wide variety of diseases. Rat poison is the traditional remedy, but it is dangerous to humans and wildlife. (RIP Flaco.)
The city is about to run a six-month test with a new weapon – birth control. The newly formulated pellets contain rat contraceptives and are specially designed for rats' taste buds.
Edita Birnkrant, executive director of New Yorkers for Clean, Livable, and Safe Streets, or NYCLASS — a group best known for campaigning to end the use of horse-drawn carriages in the city — said the pellets are specially formulated to be too good for rats to pass up.
"They're basically designed to be irresistible to rats," she said. "I think we will see a dramatic decrease in the number of rats. And I think we will also see an end to wildlife being unnecessarily poisoned."
A previous attempt to distribute birth control to the rat population was halted after six weeks. Despite the rat's short gestation period, that doesn't seem like a sufficient amount of time to deem the experiment a failure. Time will tell if this new recipe is delicious enough to make the rats ignore all the delicacies available in NYC trash cans and on the street.
Previously: New York's rat population has genetically diverged into "uptown" and "downtown" subpopulation
