wonder if grinding up birth control pills and mixing them into food the mice can steal would decrease the chance of mice reproducing in my house
this is an extremely silly idea but I am in perhaps the optimal conditions to try it:
- mice keep getting into this house
- they are much too good at evading traps
- they will eat poison but I prefer not to feed them poison bc I might adopt a cat at some point and I don’t want to poison the cat (or other local predators honestly)
- I actually have a lot of birth control pills that are old enough I don’t trust their reliability for human use (my prescription kept refilling for quite a while after I stopped taking them because I realized I don’t even mostly like doing the kind of stuff that causes pregnancy)
- I strongly suspect they work on mice, because very few medicines ever get to the point of being used on humans if they don’t pass the test of “does this work on mice”
Believe it or not, this is actually a thing done to keep pigeon populations in check, and there’s a study that shows feeding pigeons contraception (one made specifically for birds) decreases pigeon populations by 50%!
The Efficacy of OvoControl® P (nicarbazin) as a Contraceptive for Pigeons in Urban IPM
I’d be interested to hear how it goes if you decide to do it.
Ooh! I wasn’t familiar with the pigeon contraception, but I was somewhat thinking about the idea of a dovecote (a system used throughout history to control pigeons in a city and reduce how much they’re a nuisance by encouraging them to stay in one place)
like, if you build a giant awesome birdhouse/birdmansion, with plenty of food and space and good roosting and nesting places, pigeons tend to stay there, instead of elsewhere. And when they’re in the same place, people can more easily take care of them and clean up after them– and that job also includes removing some of their eggs so they don’t reproduce too much.
In my mind, the main obstacle to doing a similar thing with mammalian pests, is that it’s not so easy to control their breeding if they give live birth. But I imagine that a contraceptive might change that.