The scratching started in the attic. At first, I convinced myself it was mice – which is bad enough – but the unmistakable gnawing and scrabbling in the walls conjured bigger, yellower teeth.
‘It’s a rat,’ said my male lodger – without offering to do anything about them. ‘I saw one outside.’
Fine, I told myself. Outside is one thing – I could tolerate a rat in the garden of my thoroughly rural Somerset cottage – just so long as it’s not indoors.
And for a few weeks I carried on lying to myself that it was indeed a purely outdoor rat. You always convince yourself there’s only one, don’t you? News this week that rat infestations have surged in UK properties over the past year sent a familiar shiver of horror down my spine.
Across the country, rodent sightings are up ten per cent, according to Rentokil, while in Yorkshire and the North West, that figure soars to a hideous 20 per cent.
A hot summer and mild autumn encouraged a bumper breeding season, we’re told, and now the winter deluge has flooded their burrows, meaning they’re on the move. Into your house. Or, in fact, my house.
It was as I lay in bed at night that I realised my own ratty wasn’t a sweet, river-dwelling Wind In The Willows sort, but was in fact living in the attic.
Probably with his very large family. Their little filthy feet running backwards and forwards kept me awake at night, the covers pulled up to my chin.
Katie realised that a rat was living in the ceiling of her rural Somerset cottage, pictured, which kept her awake at night
I love animals but the thought of disease-carrying vermin in my house made my skin crawl. I could picture their flea-bitten, furry bodies, their beady eyes and long, pink, slithery tails.
I stopped cooking in the kitchen, alarmed by the idea they might be running up and down in there too. My bedroom became my own Room 101. At night I started sleeping with the radio playing and the light on.
I also Googled the problem – never do this – and watched dozens of petrifying videos of rats building nests in attics and reproducing at a rate of literally thousands a year.
Surely my ceiling was swarming with them?
For a while it became an obsession. While the lodger seemed amazingly unconcerned, I’d wander the house putting my ear against the wall to hear them. I began to convince myself I could smell that distinctive sickly ammonia scent. Perhaps I could.
I whispered to friends about my problem – the shame of rats is mice quadrupled – and was relieved that everyone had a rat story wherever they lived.
A friend with a city house told me a terrifying yarn about how once, sleeping in his basement, he woke to find a rat on top of his chest. Before running, it leapt for his face and bit his lip.
Another in a farmhouse found a rat rotting in his water tank. Hence the smell of death from the filthy hot water in which he’d been showering for the past week.
Katie got herself a cat from the RSPCA, but coaxing him indoors has proved impossible so he only stalks the garden
Just this past year, a pal in east London saw a fat, black rat wander dripping wet into her living room, having come up from the sewer through a broken drain cover outside and into the house through the open French windows, brassy as you like.
Right now, another friend is dealing with an incursion of rats in his shop so bad they are openly scuttling across the floor in the daytime, sending customers running. He agrees with the Rentokil verdict that it must be the flooded sewers sending them to ground level.
But in the countryside we don’t call Rentokil. My neighbour offered to come over with a gun. The idea of him using his air rifle to dispatch a life felt cruel, not to mention likely to leave holes all over my bedroom ceiling.
Not everyone is as soft as I am. One friend claims: ‘The test of a true man is whether he attacks or runs from a rat.’
Another tells me a grimly heroic story of his cat bringing a live rat into his house, which he killed with one smash to the spine with a fireside poker.
I have one friend in London with great rat-hunting cats who keeps what he calls ‘the rat tongs’ in a special cupboard for retrieving dead bodies deposited on his bed as gifts.
This approach seemed like a good one, so I too got myself a cat: a snarling bruiser from the RSPCA who had lived all his life in a barn. Coaxing him indoors has proved impossible, however, so he only stalks the garden.
My labrador Bear, meanwhile, is a hopeless ratter. His only contribution to controlling vermin is to eat all the food in the house before they get a chance to.
I didn’t want to put down poison because of the dog.
Besides, a friend shared a truly horrifying story of getting a pest controller in a couple of days before she went on holiday, leaving the house while the poison did its work – and then returning to living room walls covered in fat, black flies which had hatched from the maggots from the dead rats and buzzed up through the floorboards.
Could I face traps? I did some research, and realised no, I could not. Compared to mouse traps, rat traps are evil devices that can take off a limb, and the idea of confronting the bloody body of an animal that had suffered such a horrible death was not appealing. Even to someone who hates rats as much as I do.
I opted for humane traps. Giant metal cages that I put Snickers bars in. I discovered the best tactic is to work out the rat’s food source and their route into the house – and cut their access to both.
In my case, it was the compost bin and the drains. They had been whizzing up the drainpipes and into the plumbing in the roof. Thankfully, there was no evidence of them emerging through the toilet.
There seemed no way of rat-proofing the compost, so I destroyed it entirely. I wasn’t using it for gardening anyway. Then I blocked holes in my garden fence and installed rat blockers on the drains.
A few weeks later, the rats vacated the roof – seemingly overnight. The noises stopped and I started sleeping again.
We’re several months on now and, fingers crossed, they haven’t returned.
But if they do, surfing a wave of filthy, sewage-tinged floodwater, I’m going to pull out the big guns – or at least invite my neighbour to do his worst.
How big is big, and can they really swim up your loo?
With almost 40 years’ experience under his belt, no one knows more about how to tackle rats in your house than Duncan Bosomworth, technical manager at the National Pest Technicians Association. So how big do they really get? Where do they hide? And – look away now – do they actually come up via the loo…?
How do you know if what’s in your house is a rat, not a mouse?
Without seeing evidence, sound is a good way to distinguish a rat from a mouse. If you’ve got mice running around in your attic, it sounds like you’ve got rats. If you’ve got rats, it sounds like an extra housemate.
The sound of chewing behind the walls or in the ceiling is the first alarm. Their teeth never stop growing so they have to gnaw all the time to grind them down. Then it’s the pitter-patter of paws, the scratching, the squeaking. They are not solitary animals, and even two can sound like they’re having a party.
How do they get into houses?
More than 90 per cent of rat activity in houses is a direct result of drain defects. Building works, extensions, moving bathrooms around, wear and tear – it all has a bearing on the integrity of your plumbing. Rats live in the drains and only need a very small pipe defect to squeeze through into a domestic space. They can then surface, which they do to nest and have babies.
You see the most difficult scenarios in terraced houses, which are often older and share plumbing systems and sewers. You can have a rat running around under No 1 Acacia Avenue, which then emerges in the bathroom of No 7.
In the countryside, it’s what’s happening above ground that brings rats in. For instance, a chicken coop encourages rats because it offers food and water. They will find shelter anywhere they can burrow under or into.
Do they really come up via the loo?
Yes. They’re brilliant swimmers. If you have work done on your drains, and the work isn’t done properly – for example if the interceptor trap, one barrier between the sewer and a private plumbing system that lets waste out and stops rats from getting in, is left off, as it quite often is – the rats can just enter the drains under the house.
Simply install an interceptor trap or make sure the one protecting your house is on.
More than 90 per cent of rat activity in houses is a direct result of drain defects
What diseases do rats carry?
Hantavirus, E. coli, salmonella, Leptospirosis (Weil’s disease), you name it. Anything that’s in the drains – any bacteria, pathogens – they will carry, and if not in their systems, on their fur. They’re also covered in fleas, of course.
Why are there more of them this year?
There are two main types of rat activity: inhabiting the sewers, and living in the countryside where their lives are dictated by the seasons and food supplies.
Rats are burrowing animals, but all the low-lying areas and ditches where rats would normally live are flooded because of all the rain this year. In urban areas when drainage systems are overwhelmed, rats are forced to ‘head north’ to street level.
How big do they get?
Not as big as dogs! Some may grow to half a kilogram, but the majority are significantly less than that – about the size of a large guinea pig plus a tail. The largest ever was 22 in (55 cm) long, found in Normanby near Middlesbrough, Teesside, last year.
If you see evidence of a rat in your house, how many do you really have?
If you’ve got rats and they get hold of a food source, they can produce a significant number of young. But you don’t commonly see houses completely infested with rats. You can, however, have rats on and off for years because of defective drains and unidentified root causes of activity. They tend to be visitors, not invaders.
Where will they be living/hiding?
They live in drains, foundations and fields. When they do break through into areas of human habitation – such as lofts and attics – the fact that they go back to the drains to access food and water means they bring pathogens straight into your house.
How do you get rid of them?
You’ve got to be careful putting poison down in a house because if you do kill them, they’ll die in a cavity or sub-floor area, probably under the insulation, and the smell as they decompose is unbearable. You might have to break down walls and pull up floorboards to find it. So it’s better to use traps. That way, when you catch the animal, you can dispose of it.
How do you rat-proof your house?
Stopping them from getting any food is what keeps the numbers from building up, but, ultimately, rat control in our houses starts with identifying the entry points and addressing it. Otherwise, all you will do for the rest of your life is kill rats in that house because they will come back.
The questions to ask are: where don’t we want them? And where can we put up with them? Rats in drains or out in fields don’t affect us, but a defect in a drain means they’re in with you. Plumbers are key.
Is it worth getting a cat or a dog?
Absolutely not. If anything, cats bring rodents in, play with them, and then let them scurry off in your house. Cats don’t need to kill and eat them because they’re fed by their owners. Dogs are relatively disinterested. Mine will tell me when there is a rat in the trap in the back garden but has never caught a rat himself.
- As told to Rosie Beveridge
