PETA’s Answer for Philly’s Massive Rat Problem? Birth Control

A rat like the rats in Philadelphia PETA wants us to stop poisoning / Photograph via Getty Images

It probably doesn’t surprise you that Philadelphia is home to a huge rat population. It’s a big city. And big cities have rats. There’s no getting around that. But according to a recent ranking 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 full-blown public health emergency.

Well, the good folks at PETA say they have the solution and that we’ve 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.

That’s what PETA told Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker this week in an open letter penned by organization president Tracy Reiman. “Poisoning 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’s attracting them in the first place,” wrote Reiman. “PETA is calling on Mayor Parker to focus on a long-term and humane solution via prevention and rat contraception.”

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.

“I love the city, but I was shocked to see how many people still leave their trash out in bags on the street,” Shaw observed. “That just provides a constant food source for rats. We’re really just rolling out the red carpet for rats and then blaming them when they show up.”

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’s do that.)

Beyond that, Shaw insists that poisoning rats just doesn’t work and never has. “If it did work, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation, because cities have spent decades trying to poison rats,” he rightly points out. “And rats really are just born-and-bred Philadelphians, just trying to eke out an existence like humans are there.”

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 in a pilot program in 2025, and their health department recently expanded the use of ContraPest citywide. Similar efforts are underway in Chicago and report early success. These products are designed to work on both male and female rats.

But the Philadelphia Department of Public Health isn’t having it. In a statement, Deputy Health Commissioner James Garrow stated: “We do not use unproven techniques, like other agents that may affect their reproductive systems.”

One South Philadelphia resident who asked to remain nameless out of privacy concerns said he is similarly unimpressed with PETA’s idea. “There is a corner in my neighborhood that is just, like, daily people just dumping trash,” said the resident, who lives near 5th and Jackson. “It’s bags of trash, loose trash food. It’s the trash corner. And it’s disgusting. There’s rotting food and you’re out walking your dog and there are rats eating rotten food.”

The resident tells Philly Mag that he’s 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’s a bunch of garbage sitting out there again.

“I’ve never lived anywhere where you don’t put trash in containers,” he adds. “And I’ve never lived anywhere with as much trash as Philadelphia. I’ve never lived anywhere with a culture like exists in Philadelphia of dumping your trash wherever you want.”

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.

“Are you afraid of the rats?” I asked her.

“Yeah, dude, what?” she shot back. “They carry diseases! They’re fucking awful.”

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

“Are you okay?” I asked her.

“No!” she yelled. “There are fucking like 300 of them.”

I counted three.

“I saw a rat king!” she yelled before fleeing into her home.