Rat Removal Torrance

Eric: All right. So we’re here with Travis from all city animal trapping. Travis has a lot of experience in doing animal trapping and animal removal in the South Bay area. And specifically these days we’re getting a lot of calls for a rat removal. And I’m a part of South Bay, which is Torrance, there seems to be a lot of rat removal Torrance jobs and phone calls coming in. So I wanted to get your feedback on rat removal in the Torrance area.

All City Animal Trapping: Okay well thank you for having me Eric. Like you said, I’ve been doing this about 17 years and servicing the South Bay area. As you mentioned, we are heading into, I guess, what you would call rat season. Every month is rat season year round. But when they start to nest and have their young, they can do it up to twice a year. Usually it’s isolated around once a year, kind of in the Christmas time area. And that’s when you’re going to get them chewing into attics and are going underneath houses. What they’re trying to do is separate themselves from anything that’s a predator and find a way to have their babies without those babies being eaten.

That is the majority of what we’re doing right now. If you’re hearing a lot of noise running around in the attic and you’re not hearing independent footsteps, which would indicate maybe a larger animal and you’re hearing scurrying instead, or just gnawing, and it sounds like a dog with a chew toy. That’s rats and their teeth never stopped growing.

So they have to file them down. They don’t do that by chewing on something. They’ll actually cause a huge overbite and not be able to eat any food because of it. So they have to gnaw on things constantly to keep those teeth ground down a little bit. What’s weird, and I’ve been seeing this over the last 10 years, I guess, it’s to be expected But I had a job in North Torrance, I’ll say a year ago, roughly.

And the lady had called me. And so it’s an abandoned apartment complex in North Torrance, so a lot of units. But nobody really there at the time. And this wasn’t because of the rodents, they were demoing it and doing something else. But in the meantime they wanted the rodents gone. And the lady, it’s weird when I’m remembering all this stuff, because it was a strange circumstance.

The lady goes, okay so I have 30 to 40 rats in this complex, which is quite a bit. You know, normally it would be maybe in the 10 to 15 range. And I’m like, wow you’ve got quite a bit. Especially with nobody there and no food sources, that’s kind of strange. She goes, well they’re kind of my rats. And I’m like, what do you mean by your rats?

What does that, what are you feeding them? What does that indicate? And she goes, can you get them out humanely and all that. So to divert from the story for a second, humane trapping of rats is difficult. It’s very difficult and it’s not extremely cost-effective trying to catch them one by one in a trap requires somebody checking the traps every day.

And you’re only catching one for the space that that trap takes up. Whereas with glue pads and snap traps, which are more archaic forms of trapping in inner kind of brutal. The only advantage to those is multiple catches. The speed and efficiency and they’re cheaper, so you can set a bunch of them. So I’m trying to explain this to her, but I also want to convince her to do anything she doesn’t want to do.

I’m all about humane trapping. It’s just that rodents sometimes the trapping methods are more effective if you go towards the snap trap route. I get out to the property and I meet with her onsite manager and he’s like, hey, this is weird. Like, if you even walk in and run up to these rats, start running up to you because they’re in bed and I’m going, what is that?

Never heard of that, what does that mean? I guess, can we just grab them, can we pick them up and put them in a bag and take them somewhere else? What are we doing here? He’s like, I don’t know. So. As I walk in, sure enough rats are scurrying around in the property and it’s not because it’s dirty or anything like that.

It’s because they’ve been allowed to expand. That’s really all that it is. But I see one goes by. How colored it’s shaped white with black and brown spots. And I go, wait, that’s like a petco rat,. And he’s like, yeah, they’re almost all like that. Well you can identify a pet rat versus like Norway roof rat.

And some of the other types of styles of reds we deal with are like this. Kind of tarnished gray to almost bluish color. And the rest are kind of brown, maybe with little black stripes or not stripes but mis colorings and the fur. But that’s about that of what you see. You really don’t see a ton of jet black rats or white rats at all.

So I’m seeing multicolored patched cute rats. They look like the ones you see in a display case. And then they’ve also mated with the regular rats in the area. So there’s these multicolored patches everywhere in there. And because I guess she had been feeding them, they had just been multiplying and multiplying.

So the colony is partially okay with humans, but also bred in with very wild rats. And yeah, that was one of the more strange jobs I had. She wanted us to live trap all of them, which is essentially cage trapping. And that’s what we ended up doing. Honestly, it wasn’t the fastest way to get it done. It wasn’t the best way to do it.

It did take longer then setting up snap traps but she wanted them alive and then take into her place and put in a cage over at her place. I have no idea what she wanted to do with them or what her end goal was. To each to their own, but that was probably one of the first times I’d seen interbreeding between a rat that we know isn’t from here is from a petco or brought from overseas or something like that with the rabbits that are already here.

And there were substantially larger as well. It was kind of creepy. It looked like guinea pigs running around on the floor, except stretched down rat version. Yeah, that was really weird in the amount.

Eric: That’s a cool story. So that was in Torrance? You were doing rap removal in Torrance and, wow. So you guys are doing animal trapping and animal removal in the South Bay area and that’s how people found you. If somebody wants to get a hold of you, they go to your website allcityanimaltrapping.com. If you’re looking for service in the South Bay area, Travis will be the person that will be showing up at your door or in your backyard and helping you out.  Thank you, Travis.

All City Animal Trapping: No problem.