D.C. is doubling down on efforts to kill rats in some of its most infested neighborhoods by returning to a method the city has tried before: birth control.
The approach, this time combined with an effort to improve trash disposal, is part of a new pilot that will launch in the coming weeks. The city will focus first on Adams Morgan, a lively corridor full of restaurants, bars, homes and — to residents’ chagrin — many, many rats.
“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 at a news conference Wednesday.
In the past, the city’s rodent crews would treat rat burrows with poison and then move on. The new pilot will try a different approach, where the health department will focus on one neighborhood for three weeks — roughly the time it takes for a rat to get pregnant and give birth — before moving on. Crews will employ two poisons that kill rats, along with a liquid contraceptive that can prevent pregnancy. Three weeks later, crews will treat the burrows again and measure their progress.
Key to the new effort, according to Bennett, will be a partnership with civic and business leaders in the neighborhood to simultaneously improve practices around trash disposal and storage — a combination rodent control experts suggest may improve outcomes.
Lynda Laughlin, an advisory neighborhood commissioner in Adams Morgan, was skeptical.
“The only true solution is to get rid of the food source,” said Laughlin, who ran for the hyperlocal government seat in part because of her neighborhood’s rat problem. “I think this pilot will have very quick results, a quick return, but it will not have long-term lasting results.”
Giving rats birth control — or trying to — is not new.
In 2013, New York officials experimented with a contraceptive product colloquially referred to as “cannoli cream” because of its consistency. But the pilot was unsuccessful, said Joshua Goodman, a deputy commissioner at the NYC Department of Sanitation, which helps with rodent control.
“They wouldn’t go for it,” Goodman said. “They wouldn’t consume it.”
Like D.C., the city’s health and mental hygiene department is running another pilot, this time using liquid contraception, according to Goodman. “It’s 12 years later and technology is different,” he said. “I think it’s worth testing.”
Goodman and other rat experts said that while birth control can work, it can’t be done without other methods. Ultimately, what worked in New York City — where Goodman said reported rat sightings have dropped every month since December 2024 — was requiring composting, adding rat-proof trash containers and an all-out effort to educate the public on proper disposal of trash and enforce trash rules.
“We’ve used carbon monoxide poison in their burrows and other ways, but at the same time we’d put 44 million pounds of rat food on the curb,” Goodman said, referring to trash put in bags and laid on curbs. “We’d just set up this all-you-can-eat-buffet and then still ask, ‘Why are they coming around?’”
In D.C., Gerard Brown was unofficially dubbed the city’s “Rat Czar” for the 27 years he was the control program manager of rodents for D.C. Health. He said the city’s latest efforts are similar to some approaches used in the past with tracking powder that gets on rats’ fur and kills them, toxic bait dumped in rat burrows and liquid contraceptive put in bait stations.
“The idea is they kill all the adult rats and knock down the population,” Brown said. “Then if any survive, the hope is they’ll ingest the contraceptive and have no more babies.”
Brown’s crews tried liquid contraceptive for rats in 2017, putting it in 13 alleyways throughout the city. But after two years, results were inconclusive.
One problem, Brown said, was the rodent birth control works just like it does for humans: a rat has to take it daily for it to be effective. Another issue, Brown said, is that if rats still have access to food, they’re likely to choose that instead.
Bennett said the upcoming pilot will initially concentrate resources on Adams Morgan, pulling inspectors from other neighborhoods to do so. She said that while the city had shied away from rat birth control because it is expensive, the goal now is to use the product more intensely to test whether it is worth the cost, and accompany it with the trash removal and cleaning effort.
The pilot will cost about $130,000, a health department spokesman said.
If the program is effective in Adams Morgan, the city will move on to Barracks Row and Chinatown, a D.C. Health spokesperson said.
Laughlin, the advisory neighborhood commissioner, attended the city’s “rat academy” two summers ago. The experience helped her crystallize the cascade of factors that exacerbate the problems in Adams Morgan, she said, including many private apartment buildings that do not all manage trash well, and the city’s open-top trash bins. Those combine, she said, to create “a rat smorgasbord.”
She was grateful the city is focusing again on rats but hopes the pilot will be paired with other action, pointing to a bill by D.C. Council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large) that would start replacing city trash cans with rodent-proof ones.
“It’s going to need a more holistic approach,” she said.
Peter Wood, who chairs the Adams Morgan Advisory Neighborhood Commission, said in an email that he was eager to work with the Bowser administration on a lasting solution “as the rat infestation has reached alarming levels.”
So far, however, the partnership appears nascent.
A D.C. Health spokesperson said the pilot had no firm launch date but would start in the next several weeks. Wood said he first heard about the pilot program from D.C. Health on Thursday afternoon.
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