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The city of Ottawa is considering using contraceptives to bring down a rat population that has been growing out of control for several years now.
Last month, CTV News reported that Laine Johnson, Deputy Mayor and a councillor in the city’s College Ward, was going to bring forward a motion to council to ask Health Canada to approve a rat birth control product that has been used in several U.S. cities.
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That has since gone ahead, with the CBC reporting that last week Ottawa’s city council directed staff to write to Health Canada’s pest management regulatory agency.
The products in question are ContraPest and Evolve Soft Bait, both manufactured by Arizona-based Senestech. ContraPest comes in a liquid form while Evolve Soft Bait is solid and looks like tiny sausages. The company says they are EPA-approved “minimum risk pesticides” that pose little or no risk to humans, the environment or non-target species.
“This scientifically advanced bait attracts rodents with its palatable ingredients, ensuring a high acceptance rate,” the company’s web site says.
Or, as Johnson put it to Newstalk 580 CFRA’s Ottawa Now with Kristy Cameron: “It’s delicious and very sweet … but what’s kind of neat about this particular product is the rats don’t die afterwards. It targets their fertility so other rats in the population don’t get the signal that it’s bad for them, which means that they also eat it.”
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Construction of the city’s light rail transit system and new housing projects have stirred up rat populations, giving them new places to live and breed, while also disrupting some of their habitats, sending them into parts of the city where they might not have been a problem in the past.
CBC reported that Ottawa has seen more than 100 service requests for rats on private property so far this year, and 779 requests last year. In 2021 there were a whopping 1,197 service requests.
The problem got so bad that in June of 2023 the city reactivated its internal “Rat Mitigation Working Group” to deal with the exponentially growing problem. Rats reach sexual maturity at just two months, and females can have six litters a year of 12 pups each. This means that two rats at the start of the year could become more than 1,200 by the end of it.
Johnson referenced pilot projects in U.S. cities such as Seattle, Washington and New York, where the push to use rat contraceptives was spurred by the discovery that an escaped zoo owl named Flaco, which died after crashing into a building, also had a high concentration of rat poison in its system. City officials said that may even have contributed to the bird’s fatal final flight. New York also famously appointed a “rat cazr” last year to oversee the city’s battle against the rodents.
Ottawa’s plan has captured notice in Toronto, where a July 3 council action item to develop a rat reduction plan for Canada’s largest city made note of the capital’s Rat Mitigation Working Group. Toronto has not proposed using contraceptives, at least not yet.
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