Rats are showing up where Californians live, eat, and park. They’re in restaurants and grocery stores, in the walls of single-family homes, and under the hoods of parked cars, chewing through wiring that costs thousands to repair.
It’s happening in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and it’s reaching smaller cities like Auburn that never expected to deal with it. For years, this looked like a story about weather, or growth, or the number of people on the street. Those are part of it. But the people who deal with rodents for a living say something else changed, too, and it narrowed what they can do about the rats.
We sit down with Travis Mickel, president of the California Pest Management Association and a manager at Clark Pest Control, along with Jake Plevelich of CAPMA and pest control business owner Simon McKeown.
They walk through why the problem has gotten harder and more expensive to control, and who ends up paying for it. What they take away from it isn’t the lesson most people would expect.
