Packed shoulder-to-shoulder, Chicagoans robotically rush through subway stations as they navigate the maze of the morning commute. Coexisting with the good people of this Midwestern metropolis, each and every day, small rodents scurry about, finding ways to survive in the very same maze of the “Windy City.” 

Despite familiarity, are these animals seen as friend? No. They are a longstanding pest that has propelled Chicago into a chemical and psychological “war on rats.” 

SenesTech offers a new solution through their product “Evolve,” a soft bait about the size of Li’l Smokies. Bryan DiMenna, chief revenue officer and executive vice president of SenesTech, described it as a “vegan hot dog.” 

Evolve acts as fertility control, effectively and humanely managing animal populations. In early April, The Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce began a pilot program using this product. Small bait boxes were scattered throughout alleys in Wicker Park and Bucktown. 

According to DiMenna, rats reproduce very quickly — larger litter sizes, quick sexual maturity,  exponential growth even in suboptimal conditions. 

“You catch one a week, even one a day, and you think you’re doing great,” DiMenna said. “The problem is one, two, three, four rats could become thousands. How many do you have to kill to effectively end the population? It’s a lot more than a couple a day.”

DiMenna believes the rat infestation problem to be much larger than people conceive. 

“Nothing is more effective for controlling the population of rodents, insects and even humans, than birth control,” DiMenna continued. 

New York; Baltimore; Providence, Rhode Island; Hartford, Connecticut; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; and other major cities across the country have begun implementing Evolve, Dimenna said. Cost, dollar to dollar, it is the cheapest solution out there. 

Evolve contains oat flour, cotton seed protein, cotton seed oil, sucrose and citric acid, among other “clean label” ingredients. According to DiMenna, rats are easily attracted to Evolve because of its high fat content.

“Fat is the number one energy currency in all of nature,” DiMenna said. “It’s rare for them to come across a food commodity with 30% fat. Insects, leftover pizza, wrappers — rats like the path of least resistance. Our softbait is a super desirable product for them.” 

Evolve has been on the market for 18 months, but the technology behind the product was established by SenesTech over 14 years ago. It originally was developed as a liquid bait, but Evolve was recently adapted to “make it easy for consumers and pest control companies to manage,” DiMenna said. 

Jakob Shaw, manager of strategic initiatives at People for Ethical Treatment of Animals, cited rodent fertility control as an effective, non-bioaccumulative method for population management. 

“Rats, just like all other animals, breed in response to the availability of food sources,” Shaw said. “If food sources remain available, but you kill ‘x’ number of rats, all that happens is the surviving population breeds — they recognise there is an availability of food and less competition for it.” 

Shaw believes alternative marketed options, such as glue traps and poisons, to be “cruel, indiscriminate forms of animal control that are fundamentally ineffective.” Glue traps, Shaw said, give rodents a slow agonizing death over the course of days — often caused by dehydration, starvation, blood loss or asphyxiation. 

Shaw emphasizes that nothing in glue traps can kill an animal instantly. 

“All animals are alike in the most important ways: their capacity to feel pain, suffering, joy, happiness, have social relationships and lead lives that are meaningful and fulfilling to them — just as ours are meaningful and fulfilling to us,” Shaw said. “Any time we are trying to solve problems that disregard their life and their fundamental right to be alive, we are doing something terribly wrong.” 

Peggy Mason, professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the University of Chicago, has studied rat’s “helping behavior” for around 15 years. 

“We approach the rat as a good mammal, much in the same way that we are good mammals,” Mason said. 

The model of her experiment: a rat is trapped inside an acrylic tube with another free rat outside. The free rat could either ignore the trapped rat or free them by using a door that can only be opened from outside the tube. 

The free rat often helped the other in distress, despite genetic relations. What matters, Mason said, is if the rats are familiar. An albino rat raised by a black-capped rat mother will help black-capped rats — there are no mirrors in nature, rats only know what they see. 

“We don’t do it because we were taught to be nice in Sunday school or our parents said, ‘be nice to Susie and Johnny,’” Mason said. “We do it because we are good mammals. It takes a certain amount of action — to respond to another affective state is the default.” 

DiMenna said that Evolve has begun to see success throughout the country and hopes it will continue to do so, eventually completely evolving pest control for the better. 

“That concept, when you apply it to rodent control, is incredibly powerful,” DiMenna said. “If I have a chance to affect five, 10, 15 rats through poisons, that’s great. How do I affect thousands? The only way is birth control.” 

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