Rat Patrol : County Keeps Busy Responding to Citizen Complaints

A Rancho Santa Fe couple returned from a European vacation to find that their luxury automobiles had been trashed. Vandals weren’t to blame. Rats were.

Their $70,000 Jaguar and two vintage Rolls Royces were dead, victims of the omnivorous jaws of rats that chewed up the wiring like spaghetti. It took $50,000 in repairs to get the three automobiles running again.

In San Marcos, an 80-year-old woman lived in terror of rats that had invaded her mobile home. She treated the invaders like honored guests, putting out food at one end of her trailer in hopes the rats would leave her alone at the other end of the confined space. But the rodents took over, even invading the oven where she had hidden her eggs.

“It was the worst infestation of rats I had ever seen,” said Patricia Cawthon, a vector control supervisor for the county. “They had taken over.”

Rats can scamper along a wire only 1/64th of an inch thick. They can swim and tread water for two days. They can squeeze through openings only half an inch wide. They can jump 4 feet horizontally and 3 feet vertically. And they have few enemies except man.

They are gourmet eaters, preferring escargot (snails), macadamia nuts, chocolates and avocados. They also desire citrus fruits, often sampling oranges by eating them at the peak of ripeness, still on the tree.

They are the prime prey of county vector control workers who are now traveling throughout the county responding to citizen complaints about the unpleasant and unwanted invaders.

California roof rats are the most numerous of the rat species found in San Diego County and, unlike their Norway rat cousins found mainly on the East Coast, roof rats gravitate to affluent neighborhoods where food is plentiful and predators are few. There, in the lush landscape of Rancho Bernardo or seaside La Jolla, they breed and prosper without the interference of their natural enemies--coyotes, owls and hawks.

They prefer to live up high, in attics or leafy bowers, rather than in dank, dark holes in the ground. And, they can do thousands of dollars in damage with their sharp teeth, even starting fires when they nibble at wiring insulation.

Roof rats and their fleas also spread dozens of diseases, including bubonic plague.

For almost a year now, since July 1 when city councils in all 18 cities and the county Board of Supervisors approved an assessment to fund the program, vector control workers have had the authority to carry on their war against the roof rat and other varmints that carry and transmit diseases that afflict humans.

Before that, county abatement of roaches, rats, mice, skunks, bats, opossums, etc., was limited to the cities of San Diego and Coronado and the tidelands controlled by the Unified Port District, because those were the only entities paying for the service.

Cawthon, vector control supervisor, acknowledges that the first year of countywide vector eradication “has been pretty wild,” and believes that it will only get wilder as more San Diegans realize what vectors are and what services they can get from the county free of charge.

The county agency now responds to citizen complaints, does free inspections, makes recommendations on how to control the problem, and even provides the information and the pesticides or traps needed to end the problem.

With roof rats, the service does not end with solving the problems of a single householder, Cawthon said. “We spread out through the neighborhood, informing neighbors of the problem and offering to help,” she said. “Rats are a neighborhood problem.”

Cawthon also participates in an educational program, training people in sensitive city positions what to do when an anguished caller asks for aid in rodent control after hearing what sounded like a herd of elephants galloping across his or her roof the night before.

Rats are prime suspects in about one-third of the house fires labeled as “undetermined origin,” she said. The statistic is one supplied by insurance adjusters and investigators.

They chew through almost anything, including washer and dryer hoses, car wiring and upholstery, electrical cables and the like, she said. Rats can even chew through a lead pipe, although they seldom do, she added.

Although vector control is a deadly serious business, there is a lighter side, Cawthon said. She and her workers often hear homeowners flatly deny that they could be harboring rats in the household “because we have a cat.”

Cawthon then asks politely, “Do you feed your cat?” The response is usually a look of disbelief and an affirmative nod.

“Then I tell them that a cat that is fed will not hunt rats or mice,” she said. “In the early days, farmers didn’t feed their cats. The cats were forced to earn their keep,” by ridding the barnyard of creatures that contaminate the grain.

Rats defecate 50 to 75 times a day, she explained, “and that’s a lot of contamination. They often urinate when startled, and we can trace their activities by using a ‘black light’ that picks up their urine trails.”

Christopher Rodeos, a veteran vector control officer, remembers a time last year when he visited a home in Leucadia. He lifted the opening to the attic crawl space and a rat fell down into the hallway.

The fact is that roof rats, some Norway rats and even wood rats or pack rats infest most of San Diego County, living off the fat of the land and the unwitting largess of homeowners.

One woman called vector control officers out to her home at mid-day to show them the usually nocturnal rodents had adapted to human schedules.

She put out dry dog food, and, within minutes, a bevy of rodents had converged on the bowl to gorge on the food.

Cawthon and her vector control crews sometimes carry a caged rat with them when they are making educational talks because, she said, “one live rat is worth a thousand words.

“And it also puts things back into perspective. Many people are afraid of rats, and they grow to think of them as the size of dogs or even elephants.”

Before the county vector control program went countywide, most property owners called in private exterminators to rid them of rats and other pests. Now, for a modest fee that appears automatically on property tax bills, any county resident can call in the county vector control teams to do the job.

The cost averages $3.80 a year for residences and ranges from a low of $1.55 for a vacant lot to a high of $19 a year for large commercial complexes. That seems formidable competition for private firms but Ken Field, entomologist with Lloyd Pest Control, said there are enough rats and other varmints to go around.

“Our business has not dropped off,” Field said of the period since the county began its vector control service countywide. “Actually, we have called them in on some of our jobs where there is outside work to be done. They concentrate on the exterior of buildings, and we concentrate on the interiors.”

Besides, Field said, there are still plenty of fleas and ants and termites and other bugs that do not pose health risks to humans but certainly do not make good house guests and keep private pest control companies in business.

Cawthon agrees that both private and public agencies have a place in the extermination business but points out that private firms do not have authority to place poisons outside a building, nor can they teach homeowners the do-it-yourself extermination measures that vector control agents do.

The county vector control division, which has swelled in numbers since its territory expanded, offers free advice, materials and hands-on demonstration on how to eradicate any varmint or bug which transmits disease to humans, she said.

Cawthon would criticize only one feature of the county agency, its name.

“People just don’t know what vectors are. We should list ourselves in the telephone book as ‘rat exterminators’ or ‘pest control’ so people would know what we are and that the service is available to them,” she said.