Chicago Using Coyotes To Fight Rodents

Brad Block, a supervisor for the Chicago Commission on Animal Care and Control says a coyote recently spotted downtown is part of a program designed to monitor the rodent population. "The animal has the run of the Loop to help deal with rats and mice," He said no one has called today to complain. “He’s not a threat. He’s not going to pick up your children,” Block said. “His job is to deal with all of the nuisance problems, like mice, rats and rabbits.”

Comments

Re:Say goodbye to the cats

[jc42]

In New York City, we have a bad pigeon problem ... A falconer convinced the Bryant Park Restoration Corporation to let him try a hawk. ... It seemed to work for a while. Then the hawk attacked some lady's chihuahua, and they discontinued the experiment.

Well, jeez; he used a Harris hawk. He should have used a peregrine falcon. They pretty much restrict themselves to killing and eating smaller birds. They were almost extinct in North America 30 years ago, but people started introducing them to cities, and now they've recovered and are busy eating pigeons, grackles, starlings, and lots of sparrows as light snacks, in cities all over the continent.

Of course, they do have some limitations. They don't go after mice or rats; for that it's better to use an animal that lives on the ground and can poke around in out-of-the-way corners. Also, peregrines are highly territorial during nesting season (spring, summer), and won't tolerate a peregrine other than their mate within a mile or so of the nest. The pigeon population in a square mile of most cities is too high for a pair of peregrines to clean out. But this territoriality is common for most other kinds of hawks, too, so as photogenic as they are, hawks are only a partial solution to a pigeon (or starling or sparrow) surplus.

As others have suggested, our best rodent control is probably our domestic cats, with a little help from our dogs. We just have to stop treating them as pampered pets, and put them back to work doing the job that we domesticated them for. They're carnivores whose wild relatives live mostly by eating rodents, and they're well-adapted to living with humans.

It might be interesting to try introducing meerkats in a few areas. They're incredibly cute, and they also like to eat rodents. They also like to make burrows, and could probably invade a lot of the rodents' turfs. There are some other mongooses (mongeese?) that also have potential for urban rodent control.

There's also the area in southern India where people keep household cobras for rodent control ...