If the trap’s a-rockin’, don’t come a-knockin’.
New York City’s fight against rats has entered the furry beasts’ bedrooms, with the City Council approving a measure to lace rat traps with rodent birth control.
The bill, which passed Thursday, green-lighted a program that will put a contraceptive pellet called ContraPest in special rat-accessible containers across parts of the city, according to PIX 11.
If all goes well with the plan, rats will ingest the contraceptive and become sterilized — thus preventing them from filling city streets with successive generations of scamperers.
The bill was dubbed “Flaco’s Law” after the famed owl of the same name who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, captured the hearts of New Yorkers — and was then tragically found dead after consuming rat poison.
Flaco’s Law seeks to find a way to mitigate the city’s rate population through means that would prevent other animals from being harmed by accident, backers say.
“We can’t poison our way out of this, we cannot kill our way out of this,” Council member Shaun Abreu said while first introducing the bill in April.
The pilot program will run for at least 12 months, with inspectors making monthly checks to see how many pellets have been consumed across different neighborhoods.
“During such monthly inspections of the pilot program areas, the department shall track the amount of rat contraceptive in each rat contraceptive dispenser,” the bill said.
It’s only the city’s latest shot at curbing its rats’ prolific procreation with contraceptives.
Back in 1967, then-Gov. Nelson Rockefeller rolled out a program that dosed rats with estrogen-laced food — but their numbers evidently persevered. And a decade ago, a joint program with the MTA tried controlling the rat population in Bryant Park with contraceptives.
But the problem has persisted, so much so that Mayor Adams famously declared war on rats and crowned a city “rat czar” — Kathleen Corradi — who was given a full-time job to address the problem.
Abreu has said other efforts to use contraceptives fell short because the city was not persistent enough and that the bait used was ineffective at attracting rats.
ContraPest, he hopes, will make the difference.
“It’s salty, it’s sweet, and it has fatty materials within it that attract rats. They’ll bring that back to their burrow for other rats to eat,” he said.
The plan was also a hit with PETA, which expressed hope in a statement that the city was a “whisker away” from resolving its rat issue in a humane way.
“Hats off to the council for taking this big step to save lots of precious little lives. PETA pushed the city and its self-described ‘bloodthirsty’ rat czar to prioritize effective control methods like trash mitigation and birth control over cruel, lethal methods such as poison and suffocation,” the animal-rights group said.
