'I Was Horrified': Peabody Mom's Rat Encounter Raises Rodent Control Concerns

PEABODY, MA — Jenney Dale Holland was enjoying a minute of relative peace and quiet as her two children played with neighborhood friends in their Tremont Street backyard Monday night when it occurred to her that perhaps things were a little too quiet.

So she decided to take another peek to make sure all was good when she saw something that she said instantly horrified her.

"My 3-year-0ld was playing with a dead rat," Holland told Patch on Wednesday. "I was like: "Oh, my god!' and ran as fast as I could to her, telling her to 'Put it down! Put it down!' I was horrified and freaked out. And because I was horrified and freaked out she became horrified and freaked out too. She began screaming and dropped the rat.

"I can't believe I am even saying that."

Holland said she immediately brought the children inside and "washed my daughter from head to toe" before realizing that she still had a dead rat in her backyard.

"I tried to pick it up with a trash bag but couldn't bring myself to do," she said. "Luckily, I had a neighbor who came over and helped me out with that. I was beside myself."

While the trauma of the dead rat encounter was unsettling, Holland said she is now more concerned with urging the city to act to contain the rodent problem in hers and other neighborhoods where she said careless trash disposal attracts the rodents that she believes are burrowing under her house and infesting properties.

"When I walk in my neighborhood it's disgusting," she said "Trash barrels are knocked over. It's a combination of people not being educated on the right way to dispose of their trash in the middle of a rodent issue and some things that I guess just happen. I understand you may put out your trash and it gets rained on. But at the same time, I have seen trash piled up on the sidewalk and not being contained — just strewn around."

Holland said she contacted Peabody Director of Health and Human Services Sharon Cameron, whom she credited with calling back the next morning and talking about some of the steps the city is taking to control its excessive rat problem, along with agreeing to send an inspector to her neighborhood to see if there are any outward signs of things that are more apt to attract the rodents.

Last summer, the city stationed 55 SMART boxes in "high-problem areas" in June as part of what it called a "pest population control project." These boxes, secured through Modern Pest Control, were designed to kill rodents with an electric current and use no toxic materials or pesticides.

That fall, Peabody was set to place 50 more Contrapest stations "in areas of high rodent activity." That program through A-1 Exterminators includes a "fertility control" bait that does not kill the rats but makes both male and female rodents unable to reproduce.

Cameron told Patch that the city is preparing to send out requests for proposals to continue the one-year pilot program into next year.

While rodents running wild are trouble throughout the North Shore, animal control experts have cautioned against the use of poisons to control the population because hawks, eagles, owls, coyotes, foxes and other natural predators ingest the poisons when they eat the infected rats and mice and become very sick themselves. There is also a move on the North Shore to control the population of one of the rats' biggest natural predators — the coyote.

"Like many urban areas in the Northeast, Peabody is seeing an increase in complaints related to rodent activity," Peabody Mayor Ted Bettencourt said in announcing the steps the city was taking in the fall. "We recognize the potential health and quality of life issues this can pose for our residents and businesses, and we are one of the first communities in this region to implement these innovative approaches."

Residents were asked to keep outdoor trash in rodent-proof, air-tight containers, eliminate outdoor food sources — including bird feeders — as well as "nesting" areas such as old vehicles, tires and overgrown vegetation, elevate hay and woodpiles to at least one foot off the ground, monitor compost bins for rodent activity and discontinue compost use if there is a sign of rat infestation, and quickly remove vegetables and fruit that has fallen to the ground from gardens and trees.

"It is a neighborhood effort," Cameron told Patch on Wednesday. "We need people to be very vigilant in the way they manage their trash and pick up their trash if it gets blown around on trash day.

"We are trying to attack it on a bunch of different fronts. But if people are leaving out food scraps, and not picking up dog waste, no amount of baiting is going to eliminate the problem. We really need the residents to work with us together on this."

Cameron said she is working with the City Council to update language in the city's trash ordinance.

Holland said she wants to keep the issue — despite its unpleasantness — in the public eye so more residents recognize the problem and steps are taken to correct it.

"It's not safe," she said. "It's not sanitary. It should be a priority in health and safety. What if my daughter was bit? The rat is dead because it ate poison so was my daughter exposed to poison?

"I know it's not a glamorous thing to talk about. But I want to see that it's more of a priority for the city overall to get control of this issue."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)