Cover Story

RATS!!!

Worcester is dealing with increased rat sightings in recent months. ANATOLY

PAREEV/GETTY IMAGES

Poisoning rodents has long-term impact on Worcester wildlife

Jenny Pacillo is delighted by how much wildlife her family gets to watch in their Burncoat neighborhood.

“It’s such a treat — foxes, hawks. (I) never expected to see so many animals in the city, but it’s very cool.”

The mother of three talked about the two neighborhood hawks and how sometimes they’ll sit on her neighbor’s roof. “And two backyards away from ours, there’s an abandoned shed where a fox gave birth last year. There’s been a little pack of baby foxes.”

She finds any kind of bird fascinating. “I love crows, they’ll bring you presents if you get on their good side. They love peanuts and cashews so if you build up a good relationship with them, they will bring you what they consider to be a gift, like string and elastic pieces.”

But rats are a different story. Initially, she would see one rat at night that would set off the motion sensors. But it became a bigger issue over the summer, when rats would run by outside in the middle of the day.

“I was lenient at first — it’s a part of city life.” Inspectional services trimmed some bushes, which helped till this winter when the rats came back with a vengeance. Sometimes their traps get three or four a night.

She believed the construction work being done on Burncoat Street might have stirred them up and now

Veer Mudambi Worcester Magazine | USA TODAY NETWORK

Jenny Pacillo, with her children, in March 2020.

CHRISTINE PETERSON/T&G FILE PHOTO

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there are so many, that her kids will run to the window to look for rats when the motion sensor goes off. It’s hard to stay on top of the rat problem. “We use traps, but (we) used poison a couple of times and it sucks because poison is the easiest choice.”

It may be the easiest choice but it’s not a safe one; in fact, it is downright dangerous because rat poison goes up the food chain and affects all the other animals.

Yenni Desroches, former city council candidate and animal rights activist for more than a decade, agreed.

“The four main rat poisons in use are the ones that cause the most problems up the food chain, because they’re the strongest. They block the creation of the protein that controls bleeding and causes animals to bleed out due to organ rupture.”

The animals most at risk from rat poison rising up the food chain are raptors — hawks, owls, eagles and cats. “There are ways to control the rat problem before resorting to rodenticide,” according

“There are ways to control the rat problem before resorting to rodenticide,” says animal rights activist Yenni

Desroches. RICK CINCLAIR/T&G STAFF

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A rat runs with a packet of poison pellets as others chase it down in an infested warehouse in Gardner in 2004. RICK CINCLAIR/T&G STAFF FILE PHOTO

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to Desroches. Covered bins for trash and recycling will help but the viable options for the city are really only trapping and prevention.

“Trapping is a never-ending battle and it’s not something we’re going to solve because we’re never going to get rid of them,” Desroches said.

With only three animal control officers, they don’t have the time, so it falls to the DPW and the major projects like Polar Park have only exposed the problems, which were always there but underground, as it were.

Construction and other conduit replacement projects displace rats, and people see them more because it removes scent trails that the rodents use to navigate and they become disoriented. The chemical treatment of sewers has also been tied to using a deterrent that blocks the scent pathways, which could displace them and lead to more rat sightings.

“It’s not that we can’t engage in construction but we need to be aware that it will lead to seeing more rats. Displacing them can help since it causes a break in their reproductive cycle since they can’t find a safe place to reproduce,” said Desroches.

Chris Spencer of Worcester’s Department of Inspectional Services, confirmed that it is definitely an issue that needs to be addressed but certainly not at Boston levels or New York City levels.

Desroches acknowledged that those cities required more urgent solutions. “In those kinds of situations, there’s really no other option other than rodenticide.”

But Worcester’s levels are so much lower than other urban areas, she said. “We don’t hear people talking about how rats are gathering in the street. It’s just, ‘oh, I saw a rat.’”

“The methods we use,” said Spencer, “depend on state regulations and what is effective.” The city has always done more

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baiting and trapping, not only because of the problem with poisons rising through the food chain but one cannot know for certain if it handled the problem because one cannot always see the evidence.

“We don’t want to deal with the rat issue and create another issue,” according to Spencer. He explained how the city saw the complaints as a metric, which they tracked through online and phone complaint systems and noticed an uptick in the last year. The difficulty was that complaints about garbage and rats were filed differently and they had to do a word search to find all rat complaints, which were about 128. They took all of those and applied the geographical information to identify hotspots or repeat calls, then overlaid that map with other information such as construction projects. Resources will be pooled in those areas, be it education, baiting, etc.

“We’ve been putting this plan together for the past three or four months, beginning in September/October,” Spencer said. Construction now requires an assessment by a pest control expert before work begins and guidelines require restaurants to dispose of food waste so dumpsters don’t attract rodents and landlords must provide weather and rodent-proof garbage containers to minimize the food source for rats. Landlords can be fined for not supplying them.

“We don’t conduct an annual rat census so we can’t tell if they’re increasing or not but once we started discussing this, the complaints quickly escalated — possibly that people didn’t know where they could log their issues.”

Mass Audubon Director of Policy Heidi Ricci weighed in on the public perception of rat poison.

“People often look at rat poi-

The EcoTarium's resident skunk, Stormy. Skunks are also vulnerable to rat poison being passed on to them through their prey.

ECOTARIUM

son as an easy solution but it is actually not the most effective solution and even counterproductive.” Mainly, because rats don’t die right away. It takes a few days and during that time they become weak and stagger around, becoming easy prey for predators, and there is enough poison in them to provide a lethal dose to the predator that consumes them.” Predators don’t breed as fast as rats so more and more rats and fewer predators.

She agreed with Spencer that what is effective is sanitation — eliminating all sources of garbage, refuse and access to food sources like pet food, livestock feed, bird feed; exclusion — sealing up holes in foundations; and trapping. Some communities are even distributing rat-proof trash bins, something that can keep numbers down to much more tolerable levels. Trimming overgrown brush close to structures will also help because rats can stay hidden and probably be more persistent about burrowing into the foundation. “It’s a tradeoff,” she said, “because we want people to maintain more naturalized yards but maybe not right up against your foundation.”

People living in an urban environment should realize it’s never going to be possible to eradicate rats but the goal would be to keep them out of the areas of human habitation. Rat poison should only be used when other methods are not sufficient since it creates more problems than it solves. Ricci cites the resurgence of raptors in urban areas since the removal of DDT but also notes that one of Worcester’s newly fledged eagles died this past summer from consuming an animal that had been poisoned. “We don’t want to lose all those raptors that we worked so hard to restore.”

Rachel Davison, zoological manager at the EcoTarium, said that all rats in Massachusetts are Old World rats and the domestic rat that is known as a pest around here has been present for approximately 300 years.

“They’ve just been introduced so long ago, that they’re established as part of this ecosystem.” Where there are humans, there are rats and mice, she said. “We’ve just brought them everywhere with us, but obviously, if someone sees a rat or mouse in their home, it’s a more serious problem. But outside, it’s likely due to disruption — all the development

Right: Possums — the only North American marsupial — hunt rats as well. This one, Bear, was rescued and now makes his home at the EcoTarium and is a staff and visitor favorite.

ECOTARIUM

Far right: American kestrals are one of the local predators that include rats in their diet — birds of prey are especially vulnerable to the bioaccumulation effects of rat poison. This one at the Ecotarium is named Newt.

ECOTARIUM

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that’s been happening in the city.” At the EcoTarium, the rats who live on the property are part of the food system and there doesn’t need to be a fear of poisoning for larger predators.

Davison noted how Worcester residents are proud of the Worcester Common falcons and emphasized the effect on local apex predators such as mountain lions, birds of prey and coyotes.

“Obviously, when you have a lot of people, you’re going to get pests, but as human and animal habitats merge, larger predators come into contact with humans and rodenticide.”

The process of “bioaccumulation” in rats and mice or even small predators makes more poison for the top predators. “People don’t think about that,” she said, “they just want to kill rats and mice. One study had over 80% of mountain lions with evidence of rodenticide poisoning.” She believes it is for lack of education and encouraged people to think about the big picture: Small decisions can have a giant impact on the overall environment.

Both Ricci and Davison noted that a bill in the state Legislature, An Act Relative to Pesticides (H.3991), would decrease the use of rat poisons in the state. And they suggested concerned citizens reach out to their representatives to support the bill.

Desroches bemoaned the fact that the bill isn’t getting much traction but lauded the fact that the EPA has also ordered guidelines, though not officially banning the poisons.

The state bill would further regulate rodenticide, making second-generation rodenticides available through pest control companies, and it would require better disclosure of alternative methods and risks associated with pesticides.