The problem with the poisons we recommend is that they're anticoagulants, which means that the rat eats it and then melts internally. It's a little box that electrocutes the rat. The Rat Zapper sat in my garage for a couple months before my wife convinced me to try it. Paceley: A lot of people had crazy ideas about how to kill rats, from feeding them cement to luring them into a bucket of water with some cat food - trying to create your classic drowned rat scenario. NT: I guess it does, because I read where you're out killing the little guys with a Rat Zapper. But if that cute thing is chewing on the electrical wiring in your attic or chewing up your alarm system or falling down into your wall and dying, and you have to pay $1,200 to get the dry wall torn out because an oily dead rat smells pretty bad, that cuteness fades really quick. Paceley: They are cute! Look at their face up close, okay? Little bright eyes, little whiskers, little ears. But the ones on your Web site are kind of cute. Hopefully, out there the rat will be quickly eaten by a hawk. But we have had calls from people who trap the rats and then call and say, "I took him out to the desert and set him free!" Which is ridiculous, because it's just transferring the problem to the desert. Paceley: Well, we don't have a rat advocate, if that's what you mean. NT: Is everyone in the neighborhood cooperating, or is there one guy who's actually helping the rats, like that weird guy in the movie Willard? My wife takes all the rat calls, and I take all the citrus calls. It also promotes the Arcadia Citrus Program, which sends the excess citrus from our neighborhood to hungry families. We're getting up to 30 calls per day on the rat hot line. What we've done is send out information about how to seal up your home and clean up your landscape. Paceley: We'll never get them all the way out of the neighborhood, because you've always got new people and a lot of elderly women who aren't up at night and who aren't vigilant about getting rats off their property. NT: What are you doing to get the rats out of your 'hood? That's what we use to draw them to our traps. They prefer to eat apples and pomegranates, and their favorite food is cat food, when they can find it. Paceley: Citrus is their primary source of water. NT: And they apparently prefer the fruit off citrus trees, which Arcadia is lousy with. They're indigenous to the coast, and they're usually in Southeast Asia. New Times: Why are they called roof rats?īarry Paceley: They live most of their lives about four feet above the ground, traveling by trees and telephone wires and sometimes from roof to roof. On the eve of his one-year anniversary as Roof Rat Man, Paceley and I sit in the Ritz-Carlton's Bistro 24, where, much to the horror of the wait staff, Paceley, in a booming voice, discusses rat poison, bubonic plague and the distinguishing characteristics of a healthy rat turd. It's been a year since Paceley and his fellow Arcadians went public about their ongoing battle with roof rats, the pesky, plague-carrying vermin who are deviling this once-stylish part of town. Rats! Barry Paceley's got them, but like the guy with the proverbial pile of lemons, Paceley has made lemonade - which, as residents of the tony Arcadia neighborhood know, is a roof rat's favorite beverage.
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