Tasty Bait That Attacks Rats’ Fertility
Experimental Birth Control to Control Rodent Population (Wall Street Journal)
Subway rats apparently like birth control, at least when it is disguised by something that tastes like an egg cream.
That is according to an Arizona company that tested an experimental bait aimed at making the four-legged scourges of the subway system infertile and sterile rather than killing them.
From May to July last year, researchers with SenesTech Inc. of Flagstaff, Ariz., laid out the rat birth control in traps at three Manhattan subway stations and Grand Central Terminal.
About half the rats in the small-scale study took the bait, and the company reported a 43% decrease in population in places where setbacks didn’t get in the way of collecting data, according to a SenesTech report reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.