Rats! Eugene has a rodent problem

In an attempt to curb the recent rat population explosion in Eugene, the city proposes a public education campaign for its residents

Eugene is in need of its own Pied Piper. Or at least his magic pipe. Rats have invaded the city, and without a piper to lure them away with the tunes from his pennywhistle, the rats are running rampant in the streets, making Eugene their new playground.

Every morning when Kimberly Gladen, a downtown Eugene resident, walks the three blocks from her house to the EMX bus station near 10th Avenue and Willamette Street, she sees at least one rat scurrying around in the street or eating the left behind food.

“The only encouraging thing that I saw was one morning, while seeing a rat running down Olive St., I happened to also get to see an owl swoop out of the sky and nail that rat in the street,” Gladen said, addressing city council members at a public meeting in December. “I would like to see at least 100 more owls in the downtown to take care of the rat problem.”

Gladen is not the only resident in Eugene to voice her alarm. The Friendly Area Neighbors Association created a Rodent Action Team to address the community’s concerns about the increased number of rat complaints. One member, Eric Jones, even created a mobile app to track rat sightings throughout the neighborhood.

In what Ed Byerly, owner of Oregon Pest Control LLC, has called “a huge explosion in the rat populations” it is clear that the city seems to be experiencing an overall increase in its number of rats. Robin Morrison, Eugene branch manager of Bug Zapper Pest Control, said he has had to call back-up exterminators from other branches to help respond to the flood of calls requesting help combatting the rat invasions. Byerly mentioned a similar situation, saying that his business has been receiving double if not triple the amount of calls ever since the summer.

While there appears to be a citywide growth in rat populations, according to the Eugene Public Works Department and Lane County Public Health, the Friendly Street area has seen a disproportionate increase compared to the rest of the city. A 2017 map of complaints put together by the Public Works Department shows that the majority of complaints are indeed clustered in the south Eugene neighborhood.

Emily Semple is the Eugene City Councilor who represents the Friendly Street neighborhood, which falls within the boundaries of ward 1 of the city. Semple raised the issue with her fellow councilors earlier this fall at the request of community members.

Semple says she was first alerted to the problem in the summer at a neighborhood picnic. Soon after, she started receiving descriptive emails from residents of incidents involving rats, then stories of people paying thousands of dollars to seal up their houses to protect against them.

Since the issue was officially raised in the fall, the city has been working with the Planning and Development Department, along with Public Works and Public Health, to try to find a solution to the problem. The result is a campaign to strengthen public education on getting rid of the rats’ food sources and habitat.

The decision to “double down” on public education rather than pursuing a legislative solution was the result of a joint decision made by Public Works and Public Health.

“If we’re able to curb and change the trajectory of this problem just through education then hopefully that will take care of itself,” Dr. Patrick Luedtke, Lane County’s Health Officer, said.

It’s not as if rats are new news to humans. We have coexisted with them for as long as anyone can remember.

“Rats are here because we are,” Samantha Hopkins, a University of Oregon professor and paleontologist who studies rodent ecology, said. “Most rodents are specialists in something. Rats just happen to be specialists in ecosystems with humans.”

Unsurprisingly then, this rat problem is not unique to Eugene. A 2016 data analysis by USA Today shows that many major U.S. cities including Boston, Chicago, and New York have been experiencing an increase in rat complaints since 2014.

The factor that Eugene and those cities share is growth.

“Population growth and population density lead to rat population growth and density,” Luedtke said. “As Eugene starts to grow and become more of a metropolitan area, this is to be expected.”

As the human population of the city continues to grow at a steady rate, so will the rat populations. But since the population of Eugene has been on the rise for decades, there has to be another reason the rats are now becoming an issue.

That reason lies in the lifestyle changes of Eugene residents.

In 2013, the city of Eugene relaxed urban farming regulations within city limits. The increased opportunities for farming included allowing residents to have up to six chickens and six chicks per household. The regulation banned the keeping of roosters, geese, peacocks, or turkeys.

Exterminators agree that the increase of backyard chickens is one of the main reasons behind the rat infestation.

Not only is the animal feed an easy source of food for rats, but the chicken coops themselves are often excellent shelters for them.

“Rats like the same things we do. They like warmth, shelter, and food,” Luedtke said. “Obviously rats don’t have jobs and they don’t go out and buy food, so they look for those things from us.”

And if the coops are not properly built and the feed not properly stored in rodent-proof containers, then the rats have an environment that provides all of those three things.

In addition, Professor Hopkins says the absence of roosters also affects the rat population. Roosters are normally the defenders of the coop, but due to the urban farming regulation that prohibits having them within city limits, the coops are left defenseless against rats. With nothing to defend the coop, rats are able to nest and eat the chicken feed at will.

Composting is another lifestyle choice that has gained popularity over the past few years. While composting itself is not causing the rat boom, the containers that hold the food scraps and compost can be part of the problem.

When responding to calls about rodents, Byerly and Morrison often see compost containers without lids or compost left directly on the ground instead of raised in a container. Both of these features allow easy access to food for the rats.

Because rats like warmth, researchers have also been studying whether the warming of the planet is conducive to their longer survival. According to Luedtke, while this could be possible, there is currently no quantitative data available to definitively conclude anything regarding the effects of global warming on the proliferation of rats. He pointed out that national research and data into what is causing the nationwide rat infestations falls under the public health sphere. In order to fully understand why and how rats are thriving in today’s environment, Luedtke suggested allocating more national funding toward public health and not just clinical healthcare.

Clinical healthcare is the treatment administered by doctors, nurses, or dentists. In other words, it focuses on personal and individual healthcare. On the other hand, public health focuses on the health of populations, which is why it is often referred to as population health. Although it might seem like the sphere that deals with entire populations would receive more funding for research, the reality is the other way around.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2018 budget regarding vector-borne diseases is $49.5 million and the total U.S. spending on clinical healthcare in 2016 was roughly $3.3 trillion, which makes the 2018 public health budget for vector-borne diseases roughly 1.5 percent of what healthcare spending was in 2016.

There was a time in the U.S. when public health did receive slightly more attention. From 1969 to 1982, the CDC actually awarded grants to various cities through its Urban Rat Control program. At its peak, the program had an annual budget of $13 million – and that was dedicated solely to dealing with cities’ rat infestations. Today, no similar programs exist.

No matter what the causes are of today’s rat population boom, one thing health officials can say with certainty is that there has not been any significant uptick in any of the four rat-borne diseases.

“Rats in and of themselves are not a public health emergency,” Luedtke said. “It’s the diseases they carry.”

The most well known rat-borne disease is the plague, more specifically the bubonic plague. The other three major diseases are hantavirus, rat bite fever, and leptospirosis.

According to the CDC, there have been 100 reported cases of the bubonic plague in the U.S. from 2000 to 2016, only 12 of which were fatal. In Oregon, only eight people have caught the bubonic plague since 1995 and none of the victims died. The most recent case was in 2015 in Crook County in Eastern Oregon.

The Communicable Disease Department of Lane County Public Health handles the disease surveillance system for Eugene. The surveillance system tracks all reported cases of the four major rat-borne diseases.

“If there were extra cases we would know right away,” Luedtke said.

In fact, it is required by law to immediately report any cases of plague as well as any type of animal bite within one working day.

If rats are known carriers of disease, then what could they possibly be good for? According to Hopkins, not absolutely nothing.

“I’m not singing a song of praise for what rats do for people,” Hopkins said. “But they are evolutionarily interesting.”

Rodents, rats especially, evolve very rapidly which means they have “explored a lot more evolutionary space” than most species. Their diversity as a species makes them unique and valuable to the study of evolution as well as the study of ecology.

Hopkins says that one of the reason rodents get such a bad rap is because of humans’ centuries long history with them, particularly with the rattus norvegicus species, otherwise known as the common brown rat. Rattus is an invasive rat species to the U.S., unlike other species like the wood rat which is native to North America and comes into little or no contact with humans.

That makes rattus the species humans are most familiar with. It’s also the one responsible for plague outbreaks like the Black Death pandemic in Europe during the Late Middle Ages and the plague epidemic of Honolulu at the turn of the 19th century.

Once the brown rat was found to be the culprit for the spread of plague, the solution was to try and exterminate the rats to snuff out the disease. In the case of Honolulu, the city resorted to the use of fire to eradicate them. Originally, the city practiced starting controlled fires in targeted areas to burn down infected buildings and kill the rats, but, in January of 1900, one of the fires blazed out of control and was unable to be contained. It resulted in the total destruction of Honolulu’s Chinatown and displaced thousands of people who lived in the area. The only bright spot was that the Great Honolulu Chinatown Fire successfully ended the plague outbreak by killing all the rats.

Today, other, less destructive, methods are being employed to curb rat population growth. Washington D.C. is among the many major cities that have a rat problem. However, unlike Honolulu, there is no plague outbreak to battle, just the spread of rats throughout the city. They are practicing a new technique that involves the use of dry ice as a way to poison and suffocate rats in their own shelters. It is still too early to see the results of this practice.

But, because rats reproduce so quickly, all of them would need to be exterminated in order for the rat problem to be eliminated, otherwise the rats remaining will rebuild the population with their next litter and the next and so on.

“It’s really hard to get rid of something that can come back so rapidly,” Hopkins said.

So, simply trying to exterminate an entire population of rats is not feasible. Unless the plan is to burn down entire parts of the city. To get rid of the problem, the city of Eugene is pushing for a focus on public education rather than extermination or legislation.

At a February city council work session, Danny Braud, the director of the Planning and Development Department, said, “There is no single solution that we can identify, so the problem requires a comprehensive plan.”

One part of the plan to combat rats involves the implementation of a curbside recycling program that was piloted earlier this year. Braud said he hopes for it to be effected citywide next year. The curbside recycling program is an opportunity to get certain food items out of compost piles and into closed containers while distributing educational information about rats at the same time.

Lindsay Selser, the communications analyst at Planning and Development, added that they are developing an education and outreach program to help raise awareness and change human behaviors contributing to the problem. The program includes a comprehensive communication plan for at least the next six months. A new website (www.eugene-or.gov/rats) and purchased advertising space for PSAs on TV and radio are among the methods included in the department’s communication plan.

Selser also mentioned the importance of incorporating already existing efforts into their campaign. “We’re looking to leverage outreach that is already happening,” Selser said. “We have so many groups already doing this work. We just want to augment what’s already happening.”

The city already works with OSU Extension Services, offering a master composting education and composting classes. Selser said they want to ramp up publicity for those classes as part of the campaign as well.

Earlier at a December council meeting, Sarah Medary, the director of the Public Works Department, also said part of the plan is to continue to work with the city of Eugene’s composting program, Love Food Not Waste, to promote and distribute closed container compost bins.

While the majority of solutions coordinated by Eugene’s various city departments have focused on education, some city councilors voiced their support of taking more legislative steps to stop the increase in rat populations.

At the February work session, Mike Clark, city councilor for ward 5, moved for the creation of an ordinance to amend the nuisance code to include a “ban on feeding wildlife if the feeding causes damage to neighboring property or attracts rats.”

Not all councilors are in favor of the ordinance. Semple is concerned with the lack of manpower that would be needed to enforce such a regulation.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Semple said. “Who’s going to enforce it? There is no time to check on complaints and no staffing.”

She is also concerned about the major pushback that would likely come with an ordinance that bans feeding wildlife, especially from the people who like to feed birds.

Semple’s recommendation is to go back to the first complaint and educate on getting rid of the rats’ food and habitat.

“I vote for caution, but not nothing,” she said. “Save the ordinance until later, after you try education.”

City councilors will vote on the ordinance at their work session on April 11. If they move forward with the ordinance, it will result in a public hearing. The public hearing would take place during the third week of the month.