Residents of The Town of Fort Frances have been seeing more rats than usual over the past year, with most fingers pointing to the demolition of the mill as the main cause.
Mark Pentney, owner and manager of Sunset country Pest Control, said since he’s took over the business in 2017, he averaged two calls per year.
“It wasn’t much of a problem in the area,” Pentney said. “In August of 2020 when they started tearing the mill down, I had 60 calls. It keeps going on and on and on. The town is infested. People were seeing things where they never had a problem before. Then the more they started tearing the mill down the worse it seemed to get. It seems like more than a coincidence.”
While there is no accurate accounting of the number of rats in town before and after the mill demolition, rats have become a more-than-occasional sight near houses, apartments and businesses.
Although Pentney does not keep a record on the exact number of calls he’s received, he estimates to have done about 40 rat calls in town.
The reason rats are able to get into many houses in town is the number of homes with shallow foundations, Pentney explained, adding that he has only found Norway rats, known for their round ears and small eyes, in town. Norway rats are large in size and prefer to stay underground.
While rats are bigger than mice, they are easy to trick, Pentney said, but also stressed that a significant number of the rats will not touch anything foreign, which makes his job even harder.
“If they see something that’s not natural, even if it’s a bait box, snap trap, or a glue board, they won’t touch it, and they become very difficult to catch,” Pentney said. “It’ll sometimes take two to three months to trick one rat into doing something.”
When a homeowner calls Pentney, he asks them the type of a house they have, whether they have a crawlspace, how many levels they have on the home, how many access points and where they have seen the rats.
Pentney said some homeowners are comfortable dealing with rats and just call for advice; he doesn’t go to all the homes because a lot of the residents just want ideas on what to do. But if they cannot get rid of the rat or are afraid of them, Pentney dives in.
“It depends on where the rats are. If they are in a crawl space, which is pretty common, I do exclusion by blocking off all the entry points, so they don’t have access anymore,” Pentney said. “Once they can’t get into the main part of the house, until they start chewing new holes – and then I’ll go underneath and set traps.”
Pentney also uses pet-friendly bait boxes that will kill the rat within two feedings, unlike Warfarin which takes one to two weeks. Warfarin is a blood thinner that will kill a rat in eight days of constant feeding. Pentney will also use vitamin K blocker, which ends a rat’s life much more quickly.
Steve Gushulak, owner and manager of Fort Frances General Supply said they have been carrying more bait and rat poison because of the increased demand. Gushulak said they have also added more options to accommodate different customer preferences. Right now, General Supply carries snap traps, glue traps and rat poison.
Gushulak said they started selling more rat traps in the middle of 2020.
In 2017, they sold 15 snap traps. In 2018, they sold six and in 2019 they sold four. This number jumped to 40 in 2020. In 2021, they sold 76, over a 400 percent increase in sales from 2017.
“It is quite a big increase over what we normally sell,” Gushulak said. “We never really carried the bait or the glue traps before.”
Because Pentney is normally busy in the summer doing exterior spray treatments on homes for spiders, he advises residents that they can avoid rats in their homes by making sure they have screens over their dryer vents.
“If the pipe that comes out of your dryer is not a hard pipe they’ll go in right through your dryer, pop out and you’ll have them in the house,” Pentney said. “It’s all about access points. These Norway rats will get through any gap that’s an inch or more.”
Pentney also advises residents to not leave their garbage bags on their porch, because rats have a very strong sense of smell.
“You really have to take care of your garbage, because rats will smell that from a long ways away and they’ll come right to it,” he added.
As demolition of the old mill progresses, these unwelcome rodents looking for a new home will continue to be a problem in town – and likely for some time to come.
