Mr McKendry said: "We just want this sorted. We can hear the rats scuttling about all the time. Some of them are huge. It's horrible. My wife wants to move, but this is a nice house and we're settled here." He said that while some of the rats are small, others are "as big as cats". He added that he had counted 59 caught rats since 2010.
But he said the actual figure is higher as he did not start counting them until six months after the infestation started. Mr McKendry said he had tried everything to get rid of them, but nothing had worked. "I used poison but they would die in between the walls and then the smell was horrendous. I once had to smash through the bathroom wall to get rid of two dead rats. Now I just use live traps. We catch them all the time. Once I caught three in one trap."
YouTube link. Original BBC News video.
Mr McKendry said his children had become accustomed to the rodents, particularly his four-year-old son. "Recently he saw me taking out a trap and said, 'please don't kill them, they're my friends'. He doesn't understand and thinks they're just cute animals." Mr McKendry added that none of his neighbours are affected by rats and that authorities have been unable to find out how they are entering the house. The Housing Executive said efforts to get rid of the rats are ongoing.
2 comments:
I'm betting they will eventually track down the rat source as being related to the sewers. We had much the same issue (only no rats running around inside the living areas) with an old house we bought 20 years ago. The house had been extensively renovated at some point and in the process, an old sewer connection pipe had been improperly capped off and we'd get a few rats trying to live in the walls in the winter. They never made any attempts to get into the house proper (our cats and Whippets would have loved them to try) but yeah, I have to say the smell when we tried poison was NOT pretty...eventually we discovered the pipe behind an old wall in the lowest level of the house and capped it, no more rat issue!!
My first thought was that it has to be to do with the sewers, also.
The fact that this has being on for four years is ridiculous.
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