{"id":307442,"date":"2026-10-15T20:16:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T20:16:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/307442\/"},"modified":"2026-10-15T20:16:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T20:16:08","slug":"petas-answer-for-phillys-massive-rat-problem-birth-control","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/307442\/","title":{"rendered":"PETA’s Answer for Philly’s Massive Rat Problem? Birth Control"},"content":{"rendered":"

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNews<\/a>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

The animal-rights group has asked Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker to put the kibosh on the poisoning of those vile four-legged varmints.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

A rat like the rats in Philadelphia PETA wants us to stop poisoning \/ Photograph via Getty Images<\/p>\n

It probably doesn\u2019t surprise you that Philadelphia is home to a huge rat population. It\u2019s a big city. And big cities have rats. There\u2019s no getting around that. But according to a recent ranking<\/a> from the pest-control company Terminix, Philadelphia is actually the third-worst city in the country for rats, with New York and Los Angeles landing in first and second place, respectively. And the problem is so bad in certain parts of Philadelphia that City Council just declared<\/a> a full-blown public health emergency.<\/p>\n

Well, the good folks at PETA say they have the solution and that we\u2019ve been doing it all wrong all these years. PETA wants Philadelphia to stop poisoning the rodents that can spread leptospirosis, salmonellosis, rat-bite fever, tularemia, plague, hantavirus, murine typhus and something awful-sounding called lymphocytic choriomeningitis. Instead, they insist we should be giving the rats of Philadelphia birth control.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what PETA told Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker this week in an open letter penned by organization president Tracy Reiman. \u201cPoisoning and trapping rats is a cruel and ineffective approach that inflicts painful deaths on animals who are just trying to eke out an existence, yet fails to address what\u2019s attracting them in the first place,\u201d wrote Reiman. \u201cPETA is calling on Mayor Parker to focus on a long-term and humane solution via prevention and rat contraception.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Wednesday, Philly Mag spoke with Jakob Shaw, manager of strategic initiatives for PETA, to try to understand this. It turns out that Shaw had recently returned from a trip to our fair city, where he, naturally, sought out vegan cheesesteaks.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love the city, but I was shocked to see how many people still leave their trash out in bags on the street,\u201d Shaw observed. \u201cThat just provides a constant food source for rats. We\u2019re really just rolling out the red carpet for rats and then blaming them when they show up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shaw says that, for starters, the city needs to enact a law requiring all trash to be in a container, as many other towns and cities across the nation have done. (And, frankly, that makes a lot of sense. Let\u2019s do that.)<\/p>\n

Beyond that, Shaw insists that poisoning rats just doesn\u2019t work and never has. \u201cIf it did work, we wouldn\u2019t even be having this conversation, because cities have spent decades trying to poison rats,\u201d he rightly points out. \u201cAnd rats really are just born-and-bred Philadelphians, just trying to eke out an existence like humans are there.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to rendering rats infertile, Shaw says there are two main products on the market: a liquid version called ContraPest and a chewable pellet called Evolve. Baltimore began using Contrapest<\/a> in a pilot program in 2025, and their health department recently expanded the use of ContraPest citywide. Similar efforts are underway in Chicago<\/a> and report early success. These products are designed to work on both male and female rats.<\/p>\n

But the Philadelphia Department of Public Health isn\u2019t having it. In a statement, Deputy Health Commissioner James Garrow stated: \u201cWe do not use unproven techniques, like other agents that may affect their reproductive systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

One South Philadelphia resident who asked to remain nameless out of privacy concerns said he is similarly unimpressed with PETA\u2019s idea. \u201cThere is a corner in my neighborhood that is just, like, daily people just dumping trash,\u201d said the resident, who lives near 5th and Jackson. \u201cIt\u2019s bags of trash, loose trash food. It\u2019s the trash corner. And it\u2019s disgusting. There\u2019s rotting food and you\u2019re out walking your dog and there are rats eating rotten food.\u201d<\/p>\n

The resident tells Philly Mag that he\u2019s put in numerous tickets with 311 but that this has yielded no improvement, mostly because the city only cleans up said refuse on trash day and then, almost immediately, there\u2019s a bunch of garbage sitting out there again.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve never lived anywhere where you don\u2019t put trash in containers,\u201d he adds. \u201cAnd I\u2019ve never lived anywhere with as much trash as Philadelphia. I\u2019ve never lived anywhere with a culture like exists in Philadelphia of dumping your trash wherever you want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eager to see rats in action for myself, I headed out to an area on Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia that I was told has a persistent rat problem. When I arrived, there was garbage all over the place. I encountered a woman who lives in the neighborhood and asked her if she ever saw a rat. She looked at me like I was stupid because, she says, she sees them all the time. I asked her to show me.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you afraid of the rats?\u201d I asked her.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah, dude, what?\u201d she shot back. \u201cThey carry diseases! They\u2019re fucking awful.\u201d<\/p>\n

About two seconds later, she was screaming her head off, because she saw movement that, upon closer inspection, turned out to be rats.<\/p>\n

\u201cAre you okay?\u201d I asked her.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo!\u201d she yelled. \u201cThere are fucking like 300 of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

I counted three.<\/p>\n

\u201cI saw a rat king!\u201d she yelled before fleeing into her home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"News The animal-rights group has asked Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker to put the kibosh on the poisoning of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":307443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-307442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}