Johannesburg is facing a troubling rat problem. File image.
Johannesburg - Across the City residents are being faced with what some call a plague of super rats.
It is a term that is being used around the world to describe rats that have become bolder and have developed a degree of resistance to the poisons that are used to kill them.
These armies of rats have not just become a problem in urban areas across South Africa, they are overrunning cities like Paris, New York and Sydney.
What is driving them is the easy availability of food.
“And it is high-protein stuff so these guys are getting big and it's almost like natural selection on steroids,” said rat expert Diederik van ’t Hof.
The sight of rats crossing roads, scrummaging in dustbins and feeding in gardens has become a common sight for many Joburg residents.
But residents are fighting back with new initiatives that they hope will get Jozi’s rat problem under control. The one suburb of Joburg notorious for rats is Alexandra. Through the years there have been several efforts to eradicate the pests here, but so far nothing has worked.
Since the beginning of the year 35 rat catchers recruited from the community have been heading out into the township to set traps for the rodents.
The initiative is known as the Integrated Rodent Control Project and so far it has been a success. The 35 “ambassadors” began setting traps in February this year and they have eradicated 6 000 rats around several schools in the area. Their aim is to catch 12 000 rats by the end of the year.
“There has been an interest in that if this project goes well, they will take it to other regions in Johannesburg,” said Ephraim Pooe, of the City of Joburg.
The secret of their success, according to the supervisor of the project and pest controller Arthur Jacobs, is the use of vanilla essence to draw the rats to the traps.
If that doesn’t work, Old Brown Sherry has been known to work too. The community initiative doesn’t use poison which, Jacobs points out, means the rats don’t develop any resistance to the toxins. Both Jacobs and Van ’t Hof say they have noticed rats developing poison resistance.
“The poison immunity does happen, but I think that people are confusing it with bait shyness,” said Van ’t Hof, who explained that ever suspicious rats sometimes work out if something is poisonous.
Several years ago Van ’t Hof and a group of entrepreneurs developed a rat trap that they believed would go a long way in curbing South Africa’s rat plague.
Called the Hamelin trap, it worked similar to a swing-top dustbin lid. This lid is placed flush with the ground and when a rat walks over it, its weight causes the door to open and the rat falls into a bucket below.
In 2018 the creators of the Hamelin had a competition with the Joburg City Council to see who would catch the most rats. The place chosen for the competition was the Msawawa informal settlement, near Honeydew.
The Hamelin won, when after two weeks they had collected 81 rats to the City’s 25.
The problem was that the Hamelin project never got off the ground.
Van ’t Hof believes that with a network of Hamelin traps spread across the City, they could collect possibly 20 000 rats a night. This would create another problem which the inventors are looking at solving. The plan is to take all the rat carcasses and turn them into fertiliser.
“Rats have everything needed for good fertiliser, and this system would feed the rats back into the ecosystem,” explained Abel Mukwevho, the director of Entrepovate.
The process would involve freezing the rat carcasses to get rid of any diseases then put them through a machine that would first dry them out and then pulverise them into pellets.
But while new ways are being found to catch and eradicate these super rats, pest controllers across the world know that they can't be totally defeated.
“The actual solution to this is to take several steps back and take their food and water away. It is a hygiene thing and with proper hygiene you won’t see rats,” said Van ’t Hof. “You will never run out of rats, but you can get them under control.”
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