Rats Exterminator

Exterminating mice in house
Man Vs. Rat on Jakarta's Streets
It’s around 9 p.m. on a local street teeming with tiny Indonesian eateries. The lights of a fried chicken stand glow sallow, the smell of martabak lingers and there sits the ubiquitous nasi padang stall. You place your order, take a seat on the sticky bench, and rock back and forth on the uneven legs. A once-white ceiling fan whines above as you prepare to dive into one of the city’s best dishes. Then, just as your mouth starts to water in anticipation of your meal, a tiny shadow appears on the wall of plastic sheeting separating the dining area from one of the city’s open sewers. The shadow gets bigger, taking shape and form. A sharp nose sniffs at the air and then a head peeks through a hole in the plastic to reveal beady eyes, flaring nostrils and pink ears. As fast as your appetite appeared it’s now replaced with the teeth-grating disgust that comes at the sight of one of Jakarta’s infamous rats. Anyone who has lived in Jakarta for even a short time has a rat story. Rat stories here are like fish stories in other parts of the world. People’s eyes pop out of their head and their arms stretch wide when the tales of late-night encounters are traded. “It was the biggest thing I’ve ever seen.” “The rat was so big, the picture weighed 3 kilograms.” Whether it’s the tale about a rat scurrying over a foot at a restaurant or jumping out of a cupboard as someone reached for a packet of Indomie, the enmity between man and rat have become personal in this city. According to a BBC report in 2003, even then there were nearly four million rats born around the world every day — almost 10 for every human. And these rats are known to carry up to 70 different diseases, including cholera, typhus and leptospirosis, which is spread when a rat’s urine contaminates water or food later consumed by humans. Try not to think about that the next time you see one scurry across your kitchen table. Also try not to think about the unsettling fact that if you do see a rat, it’s probably a weak one that had to go out in the open to search for food. Robert Sullivan’s book “Rats” (2005) — written about his year researching the prolific rodent — says the strong ones stay out of sight, as they are big enough to take all the easy pickings from their lesser cousins. Maharadatunkamgi, a researcher at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) says that one of the ways you know you may have a rat problem is when you spot one with chinks taken out of his ear. “If you see a rat with a torn ear it means a lot of them are about — and they’re all fighting for food.” But although there are many rats in this city — at least one for every person, according to experts from the some of the city’s leading pest control offices — no one really knows how they got here, exactly how many there are or what to do to keep them at bay. “They had to have come here from Sunda Kelapa, [North Jakarta], when the first ships arrived at the port here,” says Ari, an exterminator who has worked with Rentokil for three years. “They’re called Norway rats, they’re the common rat you see here in the city. There are a lot of different species that we deal with, but the big ones you see in the sewer — they’re Norway rats.” The Norway rat, also called the brown rat or wharf rat, is thought to have originated in northern China and has spread to every continent except Antarctica by hitching rides on ocean-going vessels. These rats are the most populous mammal on earth after humans. And they’re here to stay, as much part of Jakarta as a bajaj (three-wheel taxis) or tukang kaki lima (mobile food stalls). They’re big enough to draw comparisons to small cats, and scary enough to illicit phobic reactions reserved for snakes and bats. And if chinks taken out of an ear give a clue to how many rats there are behind the scenes, it’s when you start seeing them in the daytime that you absolutely know you have a problem. “If you see them during the night, that’s natural,” Ari says. “But when you see rats during the day you have a serious problem — an infestation.” An infestation is a customer’s worst nightmare, knowing the rats are in the walls, surrounding you as you sleep, picking apart the cupboards, eating as they please. That’s when the city’s pest removal companies step in, answering anywhere up to five calls every day. Companies like Rentokil and AAG Pest Control are reluctant to talk about their repeat customers (malls and government buildings are where the money is), but whether it’s one of the city’s temples of consumerism, a high-tech office building or a hole-in-the-wall food stall, rats pose a problem. They chew through Internet and electricity cables, they devour fine food meant for high-paying customers, and they steal rendang (beef curry) meant for ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers who need a bite. “They’re everywhere and we don’t know what to do,” says Ody, who mans the counter at a local Padang restaurant. “We’re here on the street in a small stand next to a sewer. We can’t really do anything but keep the lights on and pay close attention to the food. We prepare everything here, there’s food all around. Food attracts rats.” The head of AAG Pest Control, Drajat, says: “I can’t tell you where or which one, but the biggest rat I ever saw was outside one of the city’s most famous hotels. It was the size of my leg.” “The thing is, you never know how many rats are in a building. And it’s not that they’re big, it’s that they’re smart,” Ari says. They’ve eluded man for centuries, hiding in the dark, and breeding, well, like rats. In “Rats” Mitchell detailed the rapid procreation rate of these rodents. At only three months a rat has matured sexually and a female rat will annually produce up to 12 litters of up to 20 babies — this means one initial pair of rats can become 15,000 in one year. There are a number of ways to get rid of them, though, both conventional and far-fetched. “An instructor I had once told me that if you could make eye contact with a rat — stare him down — and then touch him, you could control him. He would do whatever you wanted him to do. You could use him to make the other rats go away. A way of getting rid of the rats without using poison,” Ari says. “He said that after you had control of the rat you could spray paint it white and then when it went back to the burrow it would scare all the other rats away, off to a different place.” Normally people use more mundane methods such as live traps, poison baiting, glue traps and ultrasonic repellent. But rats can find ways around everything, Ari says. “Once we were trying to kill some rats in someone’s ceiling so we laid out glue traps,” Drajat says. “It was really dusty and dirty up there. The rats figured out a way to spread the dirt and dust on top of the glue and simply walk right over the trap.” Maharadatunkamgi agrees. Over his years of research, he says he’s seen some pretty smart rodents. “Rats learn from previous experience. When I would go to set up traps after a while they wouldn’t enter, even if we put in bait. They would watch the trap for two or three days. It got to the point where we had to leave the trap unhinged for a few days in order to let them get used to it. Then we would set the trap again.” Sometimes exterminators are smarter. Drajat says his favorite trick is putting Saran Wrap down and then putting the rat glue on top of the plastic. “The rats get stuck and as they flop and flail they wrap themselves in the sticky plastic. It makes for an easy clean up.” Now with the flood season upon us residents should prepare to see more of these resilient rats, who researchers have observed as being able to tread water for three days, floating along on flood waters and spreading potential fatal diseases. “That’s what is really scary about rats,” Maharadatunkamgi says. “They swim through the water and then move to higher ground. Once they’re there they defecate and urinate in the water — and that water goes everywhere.”

Expert opinion Pest control

There are definitely many common things that most of the homeowners have among each other. Some of those things in common are very nice and are perfect. While others are actually just issues that most homeowners would rather not have to confront. Problems with pests are one of those kinds of problems that homeowners seem to share. Well, in this article we are going to examine that kind of problem and those some things that you can do about it.
Running Ampm exterminators has allowed me to see that most people have to deal with pests in their home. Basically, how people try to deal with it are definitely different things. Some homeowners like to take care and try of it definitely all by themselves. While other homeowners would definitely prefer to pay a professional who could do it for them.
When you have problems with ants for example, some homeowners will think that the problem will be easily solved by applying some ant spray. But as most people have already realized that it only kills the ants which you can see. What happens is the next day there will be more ants in your home. The only way to fight that is to kill them at their source which is their ant hill. That is our main strategy in my ant control San Diego service.
Rodents like rats and mice are another usual pests. This is another pest which people surely hate to see in their very own home. As an example, something most people would rather not think about is the thought of mice going into your food.
But it is a fact and the only way to fight them is to set traps and poison them. There is not some kind of a sure fire way to totally eliminate them forever. But by setting poison and traps, you can prevent their population from multiplying fast. That is what we do in our San Diego mouse control service.
So as you can see pest control problems are normal. Totally getting rid of them is definitely another thing. You should be able to get rid of them if you do these things.