Weekly newsletter: June 18, 2024

Goooooood morning!

Wishing all the dads and father figures in the community a belated Happy Father’s Day! Keep the dad jokes coming.

Summer has followed up on spring’s graceful and beautiful exit with a grand (and frankly, pompous) entrance.

It’s going to be hot and humid, so make sure you stay hydrated and never leave any person or pet unattended in a vehicle. Temperatures reach deadly levels quickly in the sun.

There are many places across Barrhaven for residents without air-conditioning to cool off, including shaded areas of parks, splashpads, public libraries, and community/recreation centres.

Make sure you know the signs of dehydration, heat exhaustion, heat stroke, and sunburn to protect yourself and those around you.

Ottawa Public Health has a webpage dedicated to extreme heat and humidity, which includes an interactive map of places to cool off, tips to stay healthy during extreme heat, the effects of hot weather, and more!

Rats

A motion and letter will be discussed at City Council next week indicating support for the federal Pest Management Regulatory Agency’s consideration of a rat fertility reduction bait currently used in some American cities.

Ottawa’s rat population has increased over the last few years, fuelled by long breeding seasons, some lasting impacts of the pandemic, and the friendly urban environment.

Barrhaven is not the worst area in the city compared to the inner areas and eastern suburbs, but many local households have dealt with the issue, nonetheless.

The City’s role in wildlife management is limited by provincial legislation to three areas — managing its own properties, education, and addressing immediate public safety concerns. Additionally, neither the province nor city have a role in engaging in human-wildlife interactions on private property.

Rats and other pests are bound to co-exist with humans in any built environment. Despite most residents’ best efforts to keep their properties from attracting pests, the reality is they have adapted to co-existing in human-built environments and see us as a food source, so they will always be nearby.

Through by-law, the City ensures properties are maintained in a condition that’s not favourable to pests, like keeping a property free of waste or debris and cutting long grass.

Those standards apply to all properties in the city, including residential, commercial, institutional, industrial, and municipal under the Property Standards and Property Maintenance by-laws.

Unfortunately, even if all favourable conditions for rats were eliminated tomorrow, they have established themselves well enough to continue thriving in our built environment full of food and shelter, which takes care of the first three Fs of survival — fighting, fleeing, and feeding.

The fourth F, mating, is where the situation gets out of control and where the potential lies to bring the situation under control.

Rats start breeding at a very young age and throughout the year, with females capable of producing litters of up to 12 pups every three or four weeks. That means up to 2,000 rats can descend from just one pair of rats in a year, and that number increases exponentially in later years.

Legally, rats can be captured or killed without approval or authorisation if they are damaging or about to damage property. However, the province limits that to humane traps and pesticides as permitted by the Pesticides Act.

The problem is, after you capture and/or kill a few, there are still more… many more.

That’s why I am seconding a motion at Council next week relating to the consideration by the Pest Management Regulatory Agency (a division of Health Canada) of rat fertility reduction baits.

The motion expresses the City’s support for the process and requests the agency seriously consider the product. It does not request the process to be skipped, hastened, or watered down.

Products that reduce rat fertility were approved for commercial use in the United States in 2016, and have since been trialled in Washington, D.C., the New York City subway system, and Seattle.

Rat fertility reduction baits are an orally ingested product which appeals to rats but requires a continuous supply as it does not sterilise them. The product inhibits the reproductive process in males and females.

In a 2022 study in the Queen Anne neighbourhood in Seattle, the local rat population decreased by 90 per cent. However, it should be noted Washington, D.C.’s trial in 2019 was deemed inconclusive.

Anyway, all that to say, the City is not deploying a new rat control strategy through that motion. We are hoping by offering our support for a new-to-us method that’s been tested and/or in use elsewhere, it can perhaps become another tool to bring the rat situation under control.

The support resolution and the letter will also be circulated to other municipalities in Ontario in hopes of adding some weight to it.

If the product is ultimately approved in Canada and the City decides to use it, it will still only be a part of the effort in controlling the rat population. The City will continue its role in maintaining its own properties, education/communications, and responding to immediate public safety concerns. Similarly, property owners will need to continue keeping their properties as unfriendly to rats as possible.

The resolution will be discussed at the City Council meeting next week, Tuesday, June 25, 2024.

It’s a serious idea, but on the surface “rat birth control” really does sound silly.

Thanks as always for reading. Until next week!

-Wilson