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By Gabrielle Holtermann

Animal rights activists with Lights Out Coalition held a rally alongside City Council Member Shaun Abreu outside City Hall on Thursday, calling on the council to pass a package of three bills titled “Flaco’s Law.” 

The set of bills is named after the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023 and quickly captured the hearts of the city and social media by storm before he died on Feb. 23, 2024, when he flew into a window of an Upper West Side building. A necropsy conducted by the Bronx Zoo revealed that Flaco also had high levels of rat poison in his system, which would have killed him eventually if he hadn’t died from the traumatic injuries he sustained during his accident.

The first law would establish a rat contraceptive pilot program. City Council Member Shaun Abreu’s (D-Manhattan) bill, Intro 0736-2024, would require the NYC Dept. of Health, in cooperation with the Department of Sanitation, to distribute edible pellets that sterilize male and female rats in two neighborhoods spanning ten city blocks of Abreu’s district as part of a pilot program. 

The rats, which reach sexual maturity after 4 to 5 weeks of birth and can reproduce up to thousands of future “Pizza” rats a year, will bring the pellets of fatty materials with a sweet and salty flavor back to their burrows for the other rats to eat. The bait targets the ovarian function in female rats and disrupts the sperm cell production in male rats. 

Abreu, who chairs the Committee on Sanitation and Solid Waste Management, pointed out that rat poison did not work. 

“Rats have evolved. At this point, they eat rodenticide and spit it out. They’re learning how to avoid glue traps, which, by the way, are impacting domestic animals,” Abreu said. 

Abreu urged the passing of the rat contraception bill. The pilot program would be implemented in a rat mitigation zone where trash is containerized. 

“We can’t poison our way out of this. We cannot kill our way out of this,” Abreu said. “Birds of prey like Flaco should not have had to eat a rat that was poisoned with high levels of rodenticide. We know that had an impact on his life coming to an end far too [soon].”