Building a better mouse trap

One sunny day in Tesuque, I looked out my window where my neighbor, George, was standing with the hood of his car opened up.

“Car trouble?” I asked.

It turned out the “trouble” was a rat who’d crawled onto the top of the engine and was curled up in a corner near the firewall nursing 10 newborn pups! We eventually got she and her family into the clever cardboard trap George had devised, and released them in a lovely wooded arroyo a mile or so away.

Rats and mice have been getting into cars and buildings in rural areas and cities across the globe for centuries, and the situation’s getting worse. Before you blame the rodents, think again. Experts are blaming human-caused factors, such as climate change (which has extended rat breeding seasons), habitat loss, the overabundance of human trash on streets and in unsecured bins, and Covid-19, which drove rodents into neighborhoods when restaurants (whose leftover food created a smörgåsbord) were closed.

Traditional rodent control methods have proven mostly unsuccessful, not to mention inhumane and environmentally tragic. Snap traps often fail, maiming their victims by trapping only a foot for example (which some will actually chew off to escape) or trapping other species like birds and snakes.

Glue boards (now banned in two California cities and currently under federal scrutiny) are terribly cruel and inhumane, causing whatever gets stuck to die a slow, terrifying, painful death from dehydration, starvation or predation. Not even our worst enemy deserves to die like that.

Then, there’s poison. In May 2023, I met Joe Newman, an Eldorado resident who’s been trapping and relocating rodents for more than 20 years, educating citizens on prevention methods to safely and humanely reduce encounters with rodents in and around their homes, and warning people about the dangers of “bait boxes” and rat poisons, known as rodenticides. Joe’s not alone.

Rodenticides are a class of poisons that, once ingested, cause the rat to bleed internally, sometimes for days, until it dies. It’s a horrible death, and it doesn’t stop there. Rodents are a keystone species, so they’re prey for a variety of predators. Anything that eats a poisoned rat, alive or dead, also ingests the rodenticide, which then begins to work internally on them. This is called “relay toxicity.” Recent victims include Flaco the Owl who escaped a NYC zoo and was found dead with rat poison in his system, Barry the cherished owl of Central park; hundreds of hawks and eagles, otters in South Africa, bobcats, mountain lions, songbirds and, as Joe confirmed, coyotes in New Mexico. Domestic animals are also at risk.

Carcasses can seep poison into soil and ground water, and if all that’s not enough, according to a 2021 Audubon article, during the 1990s America’s poison control centers received 12-15,000 reports of rat poison exposure in children under the age of 6. The sticky, sweet blue and pink poison is apparently irresistible. Joe told me the packages say not to eat, drink, smoke or use the bathroom while handling the toxic goop.

“That should tell you something,” he said.

Proper disposal is also an issue because the leftovers should ideally be picked up by professionals and incinerated. Yet contractors and home inspectors tell of finding buckets of the stuff in garages and basements everywhere. But there’s hope: a rat contraceptive, ContraPest, is now being used in some of the nation’s top rat hot-spots like NYC, Washington, D.C. and LA., and studies are showing a 90 percent decrease in rat sightings — without the toxic fallout.

The bait is “like a milkshake for rats,” said Joel Fruendt, CEO of Senestech, the company that makes ContraPest, which is now available, easy to use and costs the same or less than all the other methods.

In a rat’s life span (about one year) a breeding pair can be responsible for up to 15,000 descendants. Do the math: kill a few with traps or poison or prevent 15,000 without poisoning yourself, your kids, your pets and the entire ecosystem.

We need a better mousetrap — a collaborative one that includes population control, humane eradication alternatives, and preventative measures like parking cars in garages, using lights under the hood, sealing up possible entry points in buildings and cleaning up our trash and garbage.

We’ve used rats in research (often inhumanely) for decades, and our habits have contributed to this situation. Perhaps we owe them some respect or as NYC urban rodentologist Bobby Corrigan suggests, “Before you think of killing a rat, maybe tell it ‘thank you.’”

(Colleen Dougherty’s history in animal welfare includes work in a veterinary clinic, shelters in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, and currently as a volunteer for the Valencia County Animal Shelter. She has been a speaker at the N.M. State Humane Conference on three occasions, presenting talks on caring for small mammals in the shelter setting, and compassion fatigue in animal welfare. She holds degrees in art and counseling therapy, and certificates in eco-psychology and feline massage therapy.)