Catching and exterminating rats is far more complex than it seems. There is actually a great deal of science behind what we do as exterminators. For example, when attempting to capture rats, one of the many concepts you need to understand is neophobia. In this article, we’ll briefly explain what this is, why rats have neophobia, and how it affects the pest control process.
What neophobia is and the main facts about it
Neophobia is basically the fear of new and unusual objects and items. The most obvious way that neophobia affects the pest control process when trying to catch rats, is their reaction to devices placed in their environment. This can be anything from traps to bait stations to monitoring equipment to rat mats. Rats are often very wary at first when traps are laid down to catch them, even if they contain tasty bait.
This means the whole procedure needs to be done in a careful way from our experienced technicians. We know the trick to minimise the problems posed by neophobia, such as where to place them and the appropriate time scales for each step of the process.
Neophobia in rats also affects the way they interact with new foods. This naturally inbuilt fear ensures that rats only eat small amounts of a new type of food. The reason why rats have neophobia is because it’s basically a survival mechanism which has evolved in these animals.
Imagine you were stranded in the wild and hungry. You come across a patch of unidentified berries. Would you eat the whole lot with unrestrained gusto? Probably not. What you might do instead is eat the smallest amount possible. If they don’t make you ill, then perhaps you’d eat some more. This is the function of food neophobia in a nutshell.
When rats have neophobia it impacts pest control
In some cases, neophobia means that rats will often avoid the bait pellets in a trap or even avoid the trap itself entirely. In other scenarios, the rats could eat a tiny amount of poisoned bait and notice that there’s something funny about it. After this, they will avoid that bait entirely. As you can imagine, this seriously thwarts your efforts to protect your property from rats.
So, if rats have neophobia, what can you do about it? The answer is you can do very little about the hardwired evolutionary instinct in these rodents. That being said, this isn’t the end of the world. After all, we know from experience that traps are highly effective. All you really need is patience. In the case of bait, the rats will usually start eating the food eventually, once they get used to the presence of the traps and the novelty of the food passes.
The point is that rats have evolved many behaviours that help them survive. Another example of this is “wall seeking”, where rats always move against walls because it offers them protection. The bottom line is that exterminating rats is harder that it seems. You need to know what you’re doing, otherwise the entire thing can feel extremely frustrating. Not only that, without the assistance of a professional London rat control specialist, with their know-how and time-tested methods, the rats will eventually get the better of you.
Bait box image courtesy Jamie Samuels under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.