MOLI VIEW™

Yesterday, as I was writing this blog while sprawled out on my big green couch, I heard a gnawing sound coming from the outside wall, just behind my head. Let me say this delicately: I heard a rat, trying to get in.
I am not a friend of rats, although I've heard from other people that they make lovely pets. In my experience, they make lousy house guests. They leave droppings. They skitter about in the darkness. They get caught in the walls and underneath the house, and will gnaw anything to get out. When a stuck rat can't gnaw through, she dies, in the walls, beneath the floor, or up in the attic, throwing out an acrid stink that lodges not just in the nose but somewhere in the primal stem of your memory. I have inhaled that stench more than once.

We live in a ranch house, built in 1952, with a huge crawl space beneath the house and all kinds of wood trim that over the year rots away in the rain and sun and needs to be replaced regularly. Rats crawl in the smallest nooks and crannies. Shortly after we moved in, rats stuck beneath the house gnawed away all of the foam support beneath our bathtub, causing it to cave in. Rats set up camp for a while in the big drawer beneath the oven, until we started putting traps there. One unfortunate rodent lodged in the appliance's inner workings, meeting a fiery death and destroying the stove. A particularly enterprising rat gnawed through the floor, into a kitchen cabinet, and right through our dishwasher. I shudder to think where he went after that.
The repair guy could not fix the dishwasher, even though it was still under warranty: The warranty doesn't cover vandalism by rodents. But our pest-control guy, the charming and adorable Benny, came through, going beyond his duty by heading out to a hardware store, buying some kind of putty, then plugging up the hole so we could use our dishwasher again. He left behind rat poison, which he always tells us has some kind of potion that makes rats thirsty enough to go outside before they expire. I have seen a poisoned rat or two out in the yard over the years, so I guess that's true.
Benny is not the only man I've called on to rid my home of rats. First there was Trapper John, America's Rat King, who we called when we discovered the problem. He brought traps indeed, inspected the whole house, and plugged up five holes leading to the attic, which he called a "rat resort." A few days after he left, dead rat effluvia wafted down from the door to the attic like sulfur from the underworld.
Since Trapper John's assault, we've tried to keep up, with our handy man Agustino filling holes and replacing boards as they come loose. He and his assistant even covered the openings to the crawl space beneath the house with steel mesh. The rats had gnawed through the lesser mesh they'd placed there originally.
We have not ignored the rats. Or the cockroaches. Or the ants. But we live in subtropical Florida, where vermin thrive. It is a long and wearying battle. Every month or two, Benny comes by and sprays Lord knows what toxic chemicals all around the house, inside and outside. It must be strong, because whenever we see the occasional cockroach now, she is already in the throes of death, squirming on her back with her feet in the air.
These chemicals may slow them down, but the vermin always come back. In the meantime, what are these chemical killers doing to our little Shih Tzu dogs and calico cats, who are not much bigger than rats? What are they doing to my son, who always seems to have a stuffy nose? What are they doing to my ailing mother and me?
Caught in this seemingly endless toxic cycle, I came upon an alternative called Integrated Pest Management. IPM is an intensive effort at preventing infestation that does not rely on the helter-skelter spraying of pesticides but on a full and ongoing assessment of pest life cycles and the conditions of the house that invite unwanted guests.
As of yesterday, for the first time in the United States, there is a new "seal of approval" available to pest control companies who follow environmentally friendly practices: Green Shield Certified. This means that harmful pesticides can only be used as a last resort — and then only in precisely targeted locations where careful observation has shown pests hang out.
Best of all, early studies suggest that IPM is even more effective at actually reducing pest populations than the traditional carpet-bombing methods. A study conducted by Environmental Health Watch in public housing units in my hometown, Cleveland, reveals an astonishing 95 to 100 percent reduction in roach infestation in units where residents cooperated with the program (which means eliminating food debris and excess clutter). This is especially important because low-income children tend to be more vulnerable to asthma, which is often triggered by cockroach droppings.
The first company to be certified by Green Shield is Pestec in San Francisco. Run by Nicaraguan immigrant Luis Agurto and his son Carlos, Pestec not only achieves a higher rate of success in controlling rats, roaches, bees, bedbugs, and mosquitoes with less health risk to humans, but it earns more money in the process. Rather than sending the bulk of his earnings to the chemical companies, Agurto keeps it as a reward for his own knowledge and creativity.
So it's win, win, win: for homeowners who live with fewer pests and better health, for exterminators who earn more money with less risk to their own health, and even for the vermin who are more likely to be shut out than assassinated. The only losers seem to be the chemical companies. I can live with that.
The problem now is that, besides Pestec, the Green Shield Certified providers are all congregated in New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and Maine. Please, people up north don't even know what a proper roach or rat looks like. Yet there's not a single provider in the South. I guess I'll just have to call Benny to see if I can interest him in getting certified.





Celeste Fraser Delgado is the MOLI View's contributing editor for Worthy Causes.

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