Officials in the nation’s capital will deploy birth control to try to get the city’s rodent population under control after years of failure.
D.C. Health said on Wednesday they will start placing “fertility control bait” in targeted neighborhoods as part of a “blitz” targeting the rat population. At the same time, officials pleaded for Washington, D.C., residents to stop throwing food trash on the ground.
“You have said that we need a more effective strategy, and so we have come up with a new strategy,” D.C. Health Director Ayanna Bennett said.
The rat control program is predicted to cost around $130,000 and will focus on the Adams Morgan neighborhood first before expanding to the wider city. That part of town is known for its bars and international restaurants.
“We’re gonna get the rat population down and then we’re gonna come back in three weeks to see if any of those babies survived and get them, too. But, they cannot stay down if they find anything to eat,” Bennett said. “So that means everybody cannot be throwing food on the ground. The mayor doesn’t like it and it’s helping the rats. We don’t want your trash to be outside of the bin, if at all possible.”
D.C Health revealed more about the “targeted rodent control pilot” program, saying that it would improve public health in “areas experiencing high rodent impact.”
The “three-pronged blitz” will include placing rat poison at rat burrows and “non-lethal rodent fertility control bait designed to reduce rodent reproduction over time.”
“The blitz activities will occur in three-week cycles, where a team of inspectors will apply all three control methods and conduct frequent monitoring,” D.C. Health said.
The rat blitz was welcomed by residents, who have long complained about the city’s inability to keep the rat population down.
“They be in the dumpsters. They be running in groups, like, two, three — a few too many,” one local man told NBC News4.
“Anything that they can do to help limit the rats I would probably be in favor of,” another man said. “I’ve never heard of it. I trust that the science is real. But if it is, the less rats in D.C. is a good thing.”
Other cities like New York have tried similar strategies to control the rat population.
“Two rats in a given year can reproduce 15,000 descendants,” New York City Councilmember Shaun Abreu said last year. “We have to go at the source.”
