Ah rats: What to do if your house is invaded by a plague of rodents

After a recent spate of rat-related headlines, Alex Casey asks the experts if it’s a sign of an impending ratpocalypse – and gets some tips for dealing with your own rodent influx.

Two weeks ago, I caught a rat inside with my bare hands. I had been sitting hunched over my desk when I heard the unmistakable scramble of frantic paws on hard wood, and raced down the hall to find my cat and my dog had cornered a rat in the kitchen. All three of them froze and looked back at me, terrified, before the rat seized the moment to sprint away. It scuttled from room to room like it was hosting MTV Cribs, trailed by the cat, the dog, and me, all tumbling over each other in a cartoonish flurry of limbs, tails and yapping.

I eventually threw a towel over the rat and bundled it up, calling my dad in hysterics like any self-respecting woman in her 30s would. As he calmly suggested in his rural New Zealand way that the next step was to kill it, the rat bastard seized the moment and slithered out of the towel, racing around and around the small enclosed laundry before squishing itself into a 2cm gap beside the sink. Like any self-respecting woman in her 30s, I chose to bravely stand on top of the washing machine and whisper for help like Lana Coc-Kroft.

The rat eventually went outside via a trail of cheese, but I haven’t been able to forget about it. Not just because the experience was hugely funny and traumatic, but because there’s been a subsequent flurry of rat-related complaints not only in my community Facebook group in Christchurch, but also in the nation’s media, with panicked stories of central Auckland suburbs being “overrun” by rats. “They’re coming out in broad daylight at our playgrounds,” one person told the Herald. “They’re trying to get into my house,” said another.

A quick ring around the country suggests the recent spike in rodent visitors is not limited to just my Christchurch suburb and all of Ponsonby. I ring pest controllers in Auckland, Wellington, Hamilton and Christchurch, and the majority are too busy to talk because they are buried under Monday morning callouts. “The phone started ringing a bit hotter with rodent callouts about a month ago, there’s certainly been an uptick,” says Ben Mulvey from DM Holdings in Dunedin, who says he currently receives about three to four rat-related calls a day.

So what’s going on here? Is this a Rise of the Planet of the Rats situation, or just more media hysterics being screamed from the top of the proverbial washing machine? James Russell, a professor at the University of Auckland who has studied rats in Aotearoa for more than 25 years, knows exactly what I am going to ask him within seconds of answering the phone. “This is the classic time of year when it gets cold and the rats come inside and everyone suddenly thinks there’s a rat outbreak,” he laughs. “But this is not the great rat uprising.”

Instead, this is just regular rat stuff. “When it gets cold, that signals the end of the summer fruits,” says Russell. “The fruits have died off, the rats are hungry, so they want to go somewhere where it’s a) warm and b) has food, and that inevitably leads them to c) our houses.” It’s not that the rats have multiplied, it’s just that now we are noticing them. “The rats were always there, they were just minding their own business in the warm summer tree tops eating birds and fruits,” he adds. “Now that it’s cold, they’re getting in our business.”

As for what people can do to protect themselves from rat couch surfers (or, in one colleague’s case, rat couch eaters), Russell suggests a few basic guidelines. “They’re going to be getting into your compost bins, so make sure your food scraps and your rubbish is securely stored, and that there are no gaps in your house for them to sneak into,” he says. If you can hear rats in your wall or roof, setting a trap or leaving poison is the way to go – you can even get free traps from local trapping groups across the country.

And what if, let’s just say, a scared woman catches a rat with her hands and her dad is telling her on the phone that she has to kill it, and all she can do in response is to cry? Russell says the most humane euthanasia option is a cervical dislocation, AKA a broken neck. “You basically hold your fingers around its neck and then you hold the base of the tail and you stretch it until its head pops off its spine.” And what if instead of that, you simply drove it to the next suburb and set it free to ‘Angel’ by Sarah McLachlan, while still crying?

“Then your rat just becomes someone else’s problem,” Russell says sternly.

Once my tears had dried, I posited another solution put forward by Real Housewife of Auckland Anne Batley-Burton: what if we just move a whole lot of cats in? While it might play out well in cartoons, Russell says previous experiments involving cats and stoats have failed miserably. “The cats arrive, look around and realise that rodents are actually really hard to catch, but these nearby New Zealand birds aren’t,” he explains. “So now you’ve just doubled down on your problem – you’ve got rats eating birds and cats eating birds as well.”

Because while a rat sneaking in and doing a spot of capoeira in your laundry might be stressful in the moment, the much bigger enduring problem here is that rats continue to nosh and kill our native birds and reptiles to the tune of about 25 million a year. And as temperatures warm and seasons become more variable thanks to climate change, Russell says we could even be in store for more rats in our future. “If we stop having good winters, then they’ll always have food, and they won’t stop breeding,” he says.

“Then we will get higher numbers of rats, and that’s bad for everything.”