Common questions
Your exterminator has probably seen this fail. Here's what went wrong.
Professional pest control operators are skeptical of rat fertility management for a reason. Most of what they've seen is the product deployed alone, outdoors, without a Phase 1 knockdown and without monitoring. That setup fails. The two-phase managed program is built around avoiding exactly that.
Professional skepticism
My pest control company told me rat birth control doesn't work. Are they right?
Pest control operators are right about what they've seen. The failed deployments they're describing are real. Most involve the product dropped in standalone — no knockdown first, no Phase 1 to clear the current population, no structured monitoring to confirm it's working. In that setup, you're asking fertility management to do something it isn't designed to do: clear an active infestation.
Fertility management doesn't kill anything. It changes how many rats the colony produces over the next 8 to 12 weeks. If you haven't cleared the current colony first, you have a population that's still at full size, still under full territorial pressure, and still producing at a declining but not-yet-reduced rate. Nothing visible changes in weeks 1 through 4. The conclusion from that experience: it didn't work.
The two-phase program is structured differently. Phase 1 clears the current colony through your existing exterminator. Phase 2 adds Evolve on top of that baseline. The fertility management is stopping the replacement from forming at full size, not trying to eliminate what's already there. That's what produces the field data — 79% reduction in track presence over five months.
What PCOs have seen fail
Standalone deployment without a knockdown phase. Active infestation still present when the bait goes in. No monitoring to track whether activity is declining. The product being blamed for a structural problem in how it was deployed.
What the two-phase program does differently
Phase 1 handles the current colony through your existing vendor. Fertility management starts from a documented clean baseline. Monthly track counts confirm whether the population is declining. The record shows the decline, not just the assumption of it.
Who's running it at scale
Baltimore's city-run rodent program adopted Evolve in 2025. NYC began deploying ContraPest (same maker, SenesTech) in designated rat mitigation zones in April 2025. These are city-funded programs with public health departments behind them, not vendor pilot tests.
More questions
Every question we get, answered directly.
Field data
What the two-phase program produced in monitored urban deployments.
Two independent urban sites. Five months each. Monthly track count comparisons against a Week 1 baseline.
Source: SenesTech, Inc. — February 18, 2026. Full breakdown on the field results page.
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