Halina Siekanowicz doesn’t usually name the rats she is trying to kill, but she had to admire “Robbie’s” ingenuity. It was a typical extermination job at a Toronto business for the owner of Lady Bug Pest Control. Robbie, the last rat standing, had a route that included skittering along a length of pipe. Siekanowicz set out a piece of sausage as bait. Her preference is a fine link of Polish from a good deli, not the chemical-laden junk they peddle as sausage at the supermarket. “If it’s not good, they’re not going to eat it,” she says. “Rats are not so stupid.” In front of the bait she laid a glue trap that should have held the rodent fast, but Robbie had other ideas. She watched in fascination as Robbie gnawed at the wall above the trap, until the glue was coated with debris. “Then he walked away on the piping, over the glue trap and got the sausage as a reward,” she says. “We have nothing compared to their brain.”
It took three weeks, but Robbie is no more; done in by a poisoned sausage. But there is always another rat. Behind Robbie is a writhing, rutting, ever expanding horde. Indications are they are massing for what threatens to be a creepy winter, in Vancouver, in traumatized Swift Current, Sask., in apprehensive Alberta—and especially in Toronto, where a summer garbage strike left the population fattened and fecund. While the weather is mild, they are content in their outdoor burrows, munching on gardens, fallen fruit, compost and garbage. But winter is coming, says Siekanowicz. “Sooner or later, those buggers are going to go inside of the houses,” she says. “And thanks to them, we’re going to have more jobs. We cannot complain.”
Veteran Toronto exterminator Art Bossio, owner of Advantage Pest Control, is also predicting a winter invasion. “They’ll start looking for homes, factories or restaurants—that’s when we’ll get the brunt of the calls,” he says. “But even now our calls have probably doubled over what they were last year.” Sometimes the warning signs pop up in a most unpleasant fashion. Bossio has had at least a dozen calls this year from people who’ve lifted the lids of their toilets to find rats bobbling in the bowl. Some are drowned, others are frantically treading water after crawling up the drainpipe. “They can swim up to two miles,” says Bossio. What they can’t do is clamber up the slippery porcelain. “Once they’re in there, they’re basically stuck.”
Two civic workers’ strikes in seven years have boosted Toronto’s rat population, but city policies have also been a boon for rodents, says Bossio. “We used to get our garbage picked up twice a week, now we’re down to once every two weeks,” he says. Recycling requirements turn porches and garages into domestic waste-sorting centres. “That creates extra food for the mice and rats,” he says. “And composting is a big contributor.”
In Vancouver, house-hunting rats have been an unsettling part of the downtown landscape this summer after being displaced by demolition and construction projects. The city is now considering a bylaw mandating extermination before structures can be demolished. Vancouver’s domestic rat population, though, is in no danger. Their numbers rose after a civic workers’ strike in 2007 provided a smorgasbord of uncollected garbage. Added to that is a steady influx of foreign rodents, fresh off the freighters in port and eager to gnaw off a piece of the Canadian dream.
Perhaps no place in the country is more fixated on rats this summer than Swift Current. Residents and merchants have complained since June of increasing rat sightings. Ike Reimer, owner of the local Safari Inn, went public with claims he personally caught 54 rats by late August, and he’s presented a petition to the city demanding more be done. For his efforts he was given a tongue-lashing by several councillors and Mayor Sandy Larson, who complained he was giving Swift Current a black eye and damaging the local real estate market. But Reimer’s concern was shared by hundreds of citizens at back-to-back meetings in late August. A news release from the local Cypress Health Region said the calls it fielded “range from rat sightings to bites in people’s own beds.” It warned rats can carry bacteria, viruses, and parasites that cause such infections as salmonella, hantavirus, rat-bite fever and leptospirosis, and pose a safety risk by chewing wires.
In a later release, Cypress Health escalated the infestation to a war footing, urging citizens to report all rat sightings to the city so their locations could be plotted to locate their nests. It issued a brochure, “Five Steps to Help Eliminate Rats,” with subheadings infused with the same take-no-prisoners spirit that Brad Pitt’s Inglourious Basterds are using to hunt Nazis at the local cineplex: “1. Look for evidence. 2. Clean up. 3. Starve them. 4. Shut them out. 5. Wipe them out.”
Such tactics have served neighbouring Albertans well since the first rodents—creeping west through Saskatchewan—reached their provincial border in 1950. The government, concerned with the risk of disease and with an eye to protecting its grain stores, gave the agriculture department blanket authority to repel the invasion. It instituted a public education program and created a control zone—a heavily patrolled no-rats land along its eastern flank. In 1952-’53, unfettered in that era by environmental constraints, it laced a swath of land from Medicine Hat to Provost with 63,600 kg of arsenic trioxide.
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