If I hadn’t had my kitchen done up, I wouldn’t be so worried about the Black
Death. Reading in my sitting room one night after the builders had left a
hole in the kitchen floor, I heard a rustling. Had a pipe burst? Had someone
broken in?
It was worse - considerably worse. Poking my head round the kitchen door I was
greeted by two rats dancing a macabre reel and leaping at our food
cupboards. They were not quite the size of cats but they were big.
One was a good 8in long and that was before taking account of its long greasy
tail. And while mice would have vanished at the slightest human stirring,
these boys looked as if they might stand their ground.
In the days that followed, we saw more, lots more. I put down traps and poured
poison into the rubble-strewn void beneath the kitchen but to no avail. We
lay awake at night worrying that a rat was going to get into the bed of our
three-year-old daughter, Nancy.
It nagged at us every minute - but most particularly when the creatures that
had invaded our home chewed noisily at the floorboards beneath us. Rats, I
have since learnt, possess incisors that grow constantly. To keep these
fangs short, they are obliged to gnaw through wood, lead, bricks, concrete
and even steel.
Chez Flintoff, we uphold the highest standards of hygiene of course. But in my
area - as in many others around the country - the council has cut back its
pest control services to divert resources to “priority” causes, most notably
recycling. We continue to have our rubbish collected every week but this is
London and overflowing bins are a common occurrence.
The result is rats - and lots of them. Recent estimates put the UK rat count
at between 60m and 100m and climbing. After three successive mild winters
and warm summers, rats have become fitter, stronger and much more numerous.
A female is capable of producing litters of 10, 10 times a year, and they have
thrived as rat-catchers have been made redundant and rubbish collection has
become less frequent.
Doretta Cocks, who started the Campaign for Weekly Waste Collection, says she
has been overwhelmed by public support. “There is huge anger out there,” she
said. “And it will only get worse as more councils switch over to
fortnightly collections.”
I agree. One night a couple of weeks back, two of my traps went off. I went to
investigate. One hadn’t moved. Another had skittered across the kitchen
floor, but remained empty. The third couldn’t be found anywhere. I guessed
that the rat, its neck broken by the trap, had fallen back into the void.
The next day, a dirty fug built up in the kitchen. It’s the smell of death and
as I sit here today, two weeks later and three floors up it’s a hundred
times worse.
That void under my kitchen is now full of large dead and dying vermin. Rats
that have feasted upon the corpses of poisoned friends before succumbing to
the poison themselves.
And what about Nancy? I don’t want to make her scared of rats - she already
has nightmares about butterflies and ladybirds. But on the other hand we
don’t want her to think that rats are lovely, and attempt to stroke them or
share her food if one should suddenly appear before her. What should we tell
her? NOT about the Black Death, that’s for sure. As every schoolchild
learns, the disease - carried by the fleas on rats - appeared in Sicily in
1347, sweeping through Europe and killing nearly half the inhabitants in
three years.
We think of it as a thing of the past - the last known outbreak in Britain was
more than 300 years ago - but yersinia pestis, as the bubonic plague is
correctly termed, is still with us. More than 38,000 cases have been
reported recently to the World Health Organisation by 25 different countries
in Asia, Africa, South America — and the United States.
In fact, there are believed to be more rodents infected with plague in North
America than there were in Europe in the Middle Ages. Four countries have
reported outbreaks after untroubled periods of 30 to 50 years.
I don’t want to get hysterical, but what if terrorists decided to use bubonic
plague. But Vic Simpson of the government’s Veterinary Laboratories Agency
says the disease could easily find its way to the UK without help from
terrorists.
And the scariest thing is this: the plague has started to show signs of
resistance to antibiotics. In March, the French Pasteur Institute reported
that plague can pick up this resistance from all-too-common bacteria such as
salmonella and E.coli — posing a global threat to public health.
Of course, rats don’t only carry plague. Two out of three carry
cryptosporidium (a cause of gastroenteritis); only slightly less common are
salmonella, listeria (which causes septicaemia), toxoplasmosis (blindness),
Q fever, Hantaan fever, and the lethal Weil’s disease.
Not surprising then that in the run-up to this week’s local elections,
Britain’s rubbish-strewn streets and fortnightly collections in particular
have become an increasingly hot issue. Not for nothing did the government’s
recycling quango, Wrap, advise councils to avoid introducing the schemes
ahead of elections.
Of course Britain has long been perceived as the “dustbin of Europe” by its
continental neighbours. Householders dump nearly 18m tons of domestic
rubbish and nonrecyclable waste each year in landfill, covering an area the
size of Warwick (109 square miles).
Now, however, EU recycling targets mean local authorities have to change. At
present councils are expected to recycle 25% of their waste, rising to 40%
by 2015.
Failure to meet the targets will result in severe financial penalties of up to
£150 a ton. Adding to their woes is the spiralling cost of landfill,
currently £24 a ton, rising to £32 a ton in 2008.
The solution, for many councils, has been a combination of fortnightly
collection and investment in recycling. Described by experts as “alternate
weekly collections”, they involve recyclable waste being picked up one week
and domestic refuse being picked up in the next.
Chris Murphy, deputy chief executive of the Chartered Institute of Wastes
Management, said: “Councils have to improve or face fines totalling hundreds
of millions of pounds. If they don’t look for alternatives and invest now,
they will pay for it later.”
The trouble is there are no fines for councils whose streets become strewn
with rubbish and whose rat populations boom. Shauna Lock, 36, from Bottisham
in East Cambridgeshire, has looked on in despair as the bags of rubbish have
piled up under her council’s fortnightly collection scheme.
“It’s a real pain,” she said. “My son Drew is two and we can’t have dirty
nappies and food sitting in the garage all fortnight. The smell is
horrendous. The pile will be humming in the summer.”
Another big issue is sewers, where water companies do little to eliminate
rats. In most areas, barely a fifth of sewers are inspected as a matter of
course. The rest are checked only if something goes wrong. It’s not unknown
for retired engineers to be called out in emergencies and asked where pipes
run.
Similarly catastrophic is the decision by 67% of local authorities to cut back
on rodent officers. In Barnet, where I live, pest control was closed in
2004, and reopened only after complaints from residents.
But the service came back at a cost to users, and that puts people off:
take-up fell by 75%, despite reported sightings of rats going up nearly 50%.
A spokesman for Barnet says the scheme is “budget neutral” because nobody
wants to see council tax go up. But there are discounts for people on
benefits, he adds.
According to the National Pest Technicians Association, the result of councils
charging for pest control - and people declining to pay - is an increase of
69% in the rat population over seven years.
“Councils should not charge you to deal with rats,” says John Davison of the
association.
As it happens, nobody was answering the phone when I called Barnet’s pest
control. So like many others I went to buy poison from Homebase.
A recent study involving the British Pest Control Association indicates a new
generation of “super rats”, able to consume previously lethal doses of two
of the four most common types of second-generation anticoagulants. But my
own rats showed an admirably old-fashioned tendency to kick the bucket after
scoffing the bait.
Less happily, they chose to die under my floorboards, releasing the stench
that made me want to heave and attracting an infestation of bluebottles,
which lay their eggs in the rotting rodents before swarming about the house.
Clearly then, killing the rats wasn’t enough. I had to stop them coming into
the house in the first place. I returned to Homebase and bought a device
that uses ultra-sound — beyond the hearing of humans, cats and dogs — to
irritate the rodents. But alas, my rats didn’t seem bothered.
In the end, I succumbed to the inevitable: I called Rentokil, which promised
to keep poisoning the rats and removing the bodies till they stopped coming
- then seal up any entry holes. (Do it the other way round, they warned, and
the trapped rats will chew their way out.)
The fee was vast, but I signed up all the same, and Rentokil duly sent along
one of its best technicians, Paul Boggia.
He leapt into the murky, malodorous cavity beneath the floorboards with
something like the joy of a child entering a paddling pool, noted “signs of
activity” and removed two stiff rats (“Out you come, Roland!”).
To say that I enjoy Paul’s visits would be an overstatement - I don’t relish
removing 159 screws from the kitchen’s plywood floor, and replacing them all
again afterwards - but I’ve learnt a lot from his brisk approach.
I can’t wait till he brings along a colleague with a camera that inspects
drains for cracks from the inside. And I’ll be delighted when Paul finally
declares that the last of the rats has died and that we can seal up the
walls and install Rat Radar — a Rentokil-branded device that captures and
gases rats with carbon dioxide, then sends you an e-mail or text message
advising you to be rid of it.
In that event, assuming that I’ve not succumbed to Black Death, it will give
me great pleasure to wrap the deceased rodent inside a couple of plastic
bags, and lob it in the bin - but only for so long as we have a weekly
collection.
My advice to you is to vote to keep yours for as long as possible.
