PRACTICAL TIPS
- Site compost heap on concrete blocks
- Cover base with chicken wire
- Do not overfill bins
- Lid must be properly closed
- Leave only enough food for birds to eat in single day
About - Mice and Easy
Rats and Mice are voracious nibblers and gnawers, promiscuous spreaders of disease and a right nuisance. Their population in the world is rising, with pest controllers lobbying for the use of more deadly poisons, but can we ever tackle the rat menace?
We live with rats, And we don’t like it. Rats are unhygienic, they have notoriously weak bladders- any surface they have walked on will have a trail of urine on it. they spread disease and they spoil food.
According to the National Pest Technicians Association’s annual rodent survey, callouts to brown rat infestations rose 15% between 2016/17 and 2017/18. It suggests that numbers must also be rising significantly.
There are numerous factors blamed for this burgeoning population. The Covid -19 Pandemic, and the mild winters in much of the Europe and North America in recent years, the rubbish we put out is changing, and many people have compost heaps. Even our love of decking provides happy habitat for the rat.
They also thrive on food put out on bird tables and are happy to scavenge among the cornucopia of polystyrene fast food containers littering our streets.
If we encounter a rat in our house, garden or street, our first port of call is usually the council. Pest controllers come out and they put down anticoagulant poison. Within a fortnight any rats who have eaten enough bait die.
But those in the rat-catching business are seeing the rise of super-rat, resistant to traditional anticoagulants and they want the rules changed to allow the use of more powerful poisons.
If “Rodents aren’t given sufficient bait. It’s sub-lethal dosing. If you constantly feed them small doses you build up an immunity,”.
“Rats can reproduce every six weeks and they can have six-to-eight offspring.”
So it doesn’t take many years for resistance to start to take hold.
The industry wants the government to allow wider use of brodifacoum and flocoumafen, deadlier poisons – or rodenticides – that are not permitted to be used outside.
Of course, resistance to poison is not the only thing causing the rat menace.
Some newspapers have seized on rising rat numbers as evidence of the lack of waste collection.
“Rats are opportunistic animals. They have survived because they have worked out how to live in close association with man, Thus it is perhaps not surprising that as our numbers grow, and the amount of food and waste we produce rises, so rat numbers grow. “Numbers are going up”. They go up in response to food and harbourage, as urbanisation and agriculture intensifies,
“Littering and leaving food out for the birds and other animals, all those sorts of urban behaviours all encourage their population to expand.”
And some might be worried by the authorities’ response. No government department takes responsibility for monitoring national rat numbers. It is all done at local authority level, with no national collation of figures. In short, there is no national rat strategy – Hence it will be left to the individual to fight the battle, And yet there is a danger from the rise of the rat.
Many will have heard of Weil’s Disease, also known as leptospirosis. But that isn’t all. “Rats have notoriously weak bladders. Any surface they have walked on will have a trail of urine on it,
“A lot of it is about mechanical [spreading of disease]. They are feeding on foodstuffs that have gone off, with salmonella and listeria and they deposit these bugs as they walk.”
You can scrupulously clean everything in your kitchen, but if a rat rummages through some discarded chicken in your next door neighbour’s bins and then walks over the clean pans in your cupboards, you could be in trouble. And rats have the capability to cause electrical fires and other types of damage.
“It is a big problem in hospitals with wiring, getting into the walls and damaging expensive equipment, Now many local authorities are now charging to deal with rat infestations. “Sometimes councils see pest control services as a way of generating revenue. They start by charging, demand goes down and they review the service and say nobody seems to want it. Then they close it.” This means the loss of valuable knowledge.
And part of the problem is cultural. The brown rat – Rattus norvegicus – is a disgusting animal. Even its name, the “Norwegian rat” is an inaccurate attempt to emphasise the foreignness of the creature.
References to “rat” as an insult go back to at least the 16th Century, the Oxford English Dictionary says. Other uses include “to smell a rat”, “like rats deserting a sinking ship”, “rat” as a term for the smallest or inferior of a group, and “rat” as someone who informs or sneaks on a colleague.
It’s perhaps understandable that some people in power would prefer to play down the issue of rats.
“They don’t really want to talk with rat [experts]. People want to sweep it under the carpet. We’re disgusted by rats and now we have the methods and tools to tackle them.
The uses of the word “Rat” in the language show our disgust, but the rats enjoy a position in the cultural hierarchy near to Politicians, Journalists, and Estate Agents. We can certainly help to eradicate the former, but not the latter. We at MICE AND EASY provides you the Solution to your Pests problem.
