Rats don’t discriminate. That is one of the beautiful hobbyhorses of Michael in den Bosch, experienced rat catcher of Traas Pest Control. Perhaps the best thing about his work, he says in an industrial area in Terneuzen in Zeeland-Flemish, is that it is so varied. One day you enter a social housing, the next day you are in the driveway of a castle.
It is a myth that rats in the Netherlands belong to deprived areas. Residential areas, golf courses, luxury farmhouses – the rat fighter is everywhere. People who create conditions that please the rat can be found in all income categories, all age categories, all types of households. One puts carelessly buttoned garbage bags next to dumpsters, another pours half a bakery of bread over ducks in the neighborhood pond, another spoils his villa chickens with generous amounts of feed.
And in addition to private individuals, the rat also has an affinity with business.
In the industrial area, Michael in den Bosch bends away the branches of a bush and points towards the roots. That’s where they come from, look closely, you’ll see rat holes. Further on, In den Bosch opens the lid of a rat depot, a large metal rat trap that he has placed here. He immediately sees it in the excrement: a young brown rat has entered here. Nearby, he points out ‘typical rat tracks’ to his trainee Patrick van den Hoek. An internship with Michael in den Bosch, that is also a crash course on rats.
Manners
The rat in the Netherlands is above all the brown rat, the Rattus norvegicus, between 20 and 30 centimeters long, excluding a tail of between 15 and 20 centimeters. No matter how big brown rats get, ‘they always effortlessly squeeze through holes of less than two centimeters’. An old rat light finds a hole – it’s a proverb that has been around for a few centuries.
‘You have to know the mannerisms of your opponent’, says In den Bosch, ‘then you can respond to them.’ He’s been doing that all his career, after all, although his employers have changed. Before he developed a passion for pest control and started working for Traas in ‘s-Gravenpolder in Zeeland, he worked for the Ministry of Defense for twenty years. “My enemy used to have two legs, now four legs.”
There are no reliable statistics on the number of rats in the Netherlands. Some say more than 30 million, so almost two rats for every Dutch person, but it is pure speculation. It is plausible that the number of rats in the Netherlands is increasing. In May, the NOS reported that the number of reports of rats in Amsterdam has more than doubled. A talking head from the AD of 19 July: ‘Rats in the tram, between the salad, even in bed: are we dealing with a rat plague in the Netherlands?’
We do not know how often the brown rat makes an appearance – we do know that the number of reports of nuisance caused by rats in the Netherlands has risen sharply: rats are seen more than ever. The covid years 2020 and 2021 played a role in this. People were at home a lot. There they had plenty of time to observe what was crawling around them. The rat is a culture follower, in other words ‘an organism that makes use of the possibilities offered by humans in its distribution’. The Netherlands is even more densely populated than before. ‘More people means: more places where there is something for the rat’, says rat fighter In Den Bosch.
downpours
Climate change provides extra visibility: a downpour can cause rats to wash out of the sewers. In countries with poor drainage systems, people are used to that scene, but not yet in the Netherlands. The Dutch sewers are among the best in the world, but climate change is causing increasingly heavy rainfall.
Another consequence of climate change: it freezes less than in the past, rats survive the winter more easily. Where pest controllers used to distinguish seasons, the difference between summer and winter is less clear nowadays. In den Bosch: ‘Last year I had my last big job with wasps in December.’
Especially on local news sites, it is teeming with rat messages. In 2017, a woman from Hilversum was in the news who suffered from rats that entered her bathroom from the sewer through her spotless toilet. Rat videos on social media are all the rage these days, often with a soundtrack of human screams.
Few mammals that can reproduce even faster. In the words of the late illustrious biologist and rat lover Albert Weijman: ‘Rats are biological wonder animals, how they can reproduce is really unbelievable.’ Traas Pest Control started in ‘s-Gravenpolder in Zeeland, where the head office is still located, but is now active throughout the Netherlands. If the rats start breeding somewhere in a residential area, the number of calls to Traas can rise to two hundred a day.
It is typical for culture followers that they do not struggle with fear of people. The Rattus norvegicus visits homes, warehouses, factories, shops, garbage dumps, farms, reed beds and agricultural arable land, he dwells in sewers and he explores industrial areas. Rats that gnawed on cables have already caused many barn fires in the Netherlands. With the exception of the polar regions, the brown rat is found all over the world. In densely populated areas there is hardly a square kilometer where it does not show itself.
culture follower
In the industrial area where we walk, we are surrounded by rats, says In den Bosch. He has built up so much expertise in the five years that he has been doing this work that he can already hear their rustling from a great distance. ‘Rats know much better when people are approaching than humans know when rats are approaching.’
When darkness falls and the birds and people disappear, the rat will have the realm here alone. In den Bosch carefully inspects the bottom of a series of containers. He knows: it can look so clean somewhere, it is good to hide under containers from the enemy.
The big question is how dangerous that enemy actually is. There is a lot of myth about the rat. This mammal, you can euphemistically put it, has been struggling with an image problem for many centuries. Quite a few people do have a colleague or brother-in-law they call ‘a rat’, and that is never meant as a compliment. All the proverbs about the rat, and there are many, are negative. Someone who has been ‘sniffed by the rats’ does something that is bizarre, indecent, inappropriate. It was said about Boris Johnson. When his position as prime minister of Great Britain began to falter, rats were brought in again: those rats left the ship, Johnson was abandoned by false party members to whom he was no longer useful.
But don’t confuse the rat in our culture with the culture follower that the rat is. A rat, that’s like a squirrel, only without a bushy tail. Dixit bestselling author and behavioral biologist Maarten ‘t Hart who, in addition to the Reformed faith, Bach and Maassluis, also has a lot of expertise about rats. His scientific work rats from 1973 is still in print.
In a conversation about the brown rat with Volkskrant nature specialist Caspar Janssen, ‘t Hart said in 2015: ‘There are many myths about rats. That they attack people, that they eat children, that they spread many diseases, that they are dirty. The rat is actually like a squirrel. We think squirrels are very cute. People’s reaction to the sight of a brown rat ranges from horror to fear. I suspect it’s because the rat resembles humans in a way.’
Specialists are especially annoyed by Indian stories about diseases that rats are said to spread. Rats were once notorious for transmitting Weil’s disease, but it is now treatable with antibiotics. Rats are also spreaders of salmonella, but there are so many more.
‘The success of the rat is the product of man’, says Maarten ‘t Hart. ‘We have partly eradicated its natural enemies, such as the otter, and have created favorable conditions for it. Now we have to fight him.’
Less waste, more nature
At the industrial estate in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen, Michael in den Bosch shows the contents of his rat control bag: flashlight, screwdrivers, peanut butter, plastic gloves, and yes, a jar of red poison. “Poison is a last resort,” he says. The use of rat poison has been steadily restricted in the Netherlands. Since 2017, it is no longer allowed to be used outdoors, barring exceptional locations. From next year, indoor use for private individuals will also be prohibited.
How can the ban on rat poison be reconciled with the increase in rats? Michael in den Bosch points to the gulls circling above our heads: ‘Did you know that the gull is a protected species? And the kestrel? And the barn owl?’ The more rat poison used, the more rat poison enters our food chain. Birds can’t just eat rats that have consumed poison, they can mistake that poison for food themselves.
The shortest answer to what helps against rats is: less waste and more nature – more otters, more birds of prey. ‘Every rat problem is ultimately a human problem,’ says In den Bosch. It is always people who provide the right conditions, who produce large amounts of waste and who leave it behind. Prevention is, in this case too, so much better than fighting. Most people know by now that we saddle our neighborhood with rats if we throw carelessly buttoned garbage bags next to containers. But hikers who donate generous amounts of bread to ducks often don’t know that the ducks can’t eat that much bread. Schoolchildren who throw away bread spread at home on a large scale are contributing to rat infestation.
A special category of ‘rat trappers’ are the various Dutch people who did not grow up on farms, but nowadays keep chickens, even in the middle of the city. Michael in den Bosch sometimes feels like a detective when he is once again summoned by city dwellers with chickens. ‘Then I ask, ‘What time do you feed those chickens? Do you give them a whole kilo of food again? What time do the chickens go to roost? Is all the food gone when they roost? No? And is all the food finished in the morning? Then 1 + 1 = 2.’
‘I have a thing for outcasts and you can rightly call the brown rat an outcast’, said Maarten ‘t Hart in his conversation with Caspar Janssen about his admiration for the rat. ‘The rat is an extremely successful animal that manages to survive despite centuries of fierce fighting. He just sympathizes with us.’