A smile flashes across Neil Mooney’s face as he pulls up to the silage pit, his truck rolling over rough, snow-covered earth before coming to a stop.
“This looks really good, I am really impressed with myself,” he says, getting out of the truck.
He walks to the pit and jumps spryly across the cement blocks that form stepping stones to the ledge of the pit.
His eyes scan the pit slowly, and as they come to rest on a ravaged patch of plastic covering, the smile fades. The rats are still there.
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Mooney is the pest control officer for the Rural Municipality of Corman Park. He took the job after retiring from Agriculture Canada.
“I thought I’d take this as a part-time position and just fill in some needed hours, but it’s ballooned into more than that.”
He said the budget for Saskatchewan’s rat control program is approximately $530,000.
Although he doesn’t think Saskatchewan’s current rat problem is anything like it has been in the past, he admitted there are still pockets in the province that have more rodent issues than others.
“It’s a little tough to pinpoint them because it does fluctuate year after year, but the eastern side of the province is a little worse than the west.”
Throughout the week, Mooney drives to infested farms in the RM, which surrounds Saskatoon. He looks for signs of rats, resets his bait stations and asks landowners what kind of recent activity they’ve seen. Getting rid of rats is not something that can be done in a day.
“It takes time and it takes a fair amount of bait to eliminate this type of rodent,” Mooney said.
Different baits are necessary for different situations, and no two rat infestations are exactly alike.
“There’s quite a few baits out, there’s single feeds, that have replaced the warfarin,” Mooney said.
“A lot of people still like the warfarin, though.”
Warfarin takes time and repeated feeding to kill a rat. Sporadic use will allow an infestation to rebuild its population, and the new rats will have a resistance to it that will make it much less effective. Mooney tends to use the newer baits, which he said are more lethal and kill in a shorter time.
Rats will also become shy around things they don’t know and urinate on foreign objects to mark them as possible threats. To combat this, Mooney tries to match his bait to what the rats are feeding on and build his bait stations out of familiar materials he finds around the infested area, such as old tires and wood.
Although Mooney has heard strange rat remedies over the years, he doesn’t put much stock in them.
He recalled a rural tale about a farmer who lit a rat on fire and released it into his infested barn in the hopes that the other rats would smell the singed hair and think the building was on fire. The farmer got rid of his rat problem, but only after the flaming rat burned his barn to the ground.
He said domesticated animals such as cats and dogs do little to control rat populations. Although it’s possible for a cat to take on a rat, it’s usually only the females that do so and only if they have young that they’re trying to protect. Dogs are initially agitated by rats but will eventually just ignore them.
The best help a farmer can get comes in the form of another pest.
“Weasels are probably the best natural predator of the rat,” said Mooney, although he admitted that it isn’t wise to have weasels around if there are chickens or other small animals on the farm.
While poisons and the occasional weasel are effective, the best method of rat control is keeping them away in the first place. This means clearing debris from the yard, keeping the grass short and covering sources of food such as silage bins and garbage. A clean yard offers little in the way of hiding spots, which doesn’t agree with the rat lifestyle.
Still, rats can show up anywhere there are people. One of the obstacles Mooney faces is that some people won’t report the problem because they’re afraid their neighbours will assume they haven’t been keeping their property clean.
“Guys that have wild rats, they’re a little embarrassed, like it’s maybe a mark against them or whatever,” he said.
“People have to get over this sensitivity issue.”
