Twins Featured on the New York Times!

Check out our feature on the New York Times, by Oliver Whang

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/27/science/rats-rodents-trapping.html

Here is a quick read of some segments of the article: 

The place: a modest house at the end of a narrow street in Culver City, Calif. The problem: The house’s owner had been feeding bread to a population of rats, which had moved into her kitchen and living room and then into the ceilings, where they had begun encroaching on the neighboring tenants from above. The diagnosis: “Unbelievable,” said Dave Schuelke, a buff and ruddy-faced exterminator who is one-half of the pest control and home repair company Twin Home Experts. “I’ve never seen this before.”

Mr. Schuelke was speaking breathlessly to a camera that he had trained on himself. He was alone behind the house, but his intended audience was the nearly 250,000 subscribers of the Twin Home Experts YouTube channel, where he and his identical twin brother, Jim, post videos of themselves on the job. Nine years ago they began uploading videos about general home repair, with titles like “How to Unclog a Toilet Without a Plunger” and “How to Find a Sewer Odor,” but, more than 70 million views later, their content has skewed toward rats. “Attic Rats! We Smoked Them Out” is one recent title. Also, “Destroying Fat Rats in Washington, D.C.” And “Rat Trapping in Mexico City, We Baited With Churros.”

“People want to see that type of gory-looking stuff,” Dave Schuelke said, setting down the camera. “People want to see the action.”

View counts are directly related to whether a video’s thumbnail shows some sort of tool — a screwdriver, or a Sawzall, or a bulked-up trap — pointing at a rat. The thumbnail of the Schuelkes’ most popular video, with over five million views, features an airsoft gun pointed at a rat nest.

Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, that ignominious ratropolis, has also been playing on this morbid fascination with the midsize rodents. Since the beginning of his term in 2022, Mayor Adams has been vocal about his fear and hatred of rats and about his drive to kill them. In November, his office posted a job listing for a rat czar; whoever took the job, the listing noted, had to be “somewhat bloodthirsty.” Deployed as a lighthearted rallying point amid other, more charged policies, the anti-rat agenda has been covered extensively by media outlets. “We’re making it clear that rats do not run this city,” Mayor Adams said in a news conference last year.

Reasons for controlling the urban rat population are abundant: The animals can spread diseases to humans, destroy property and damage native ecosystems. But rats are also cognitively advanced social animals, and questions about how to effectively control them can raise tricky ethical questions. Glue traps will leave rats starving, for days, before dying. Poison leads to a slow, painful death and can endanger other wildlife. Standard wooden snap traps often catch limbs or tails, forcing rats to gnaw them off in desperation. Live-catch traps are difficult to implement, and when many rats are stuck in the same place together without food, they sometimes eat one another.

Even if rats are extracted from an urban environment, what do you do with them? Release them into the woods, where they can damage existing ecosystems? Keep them as pets? Rats are reviled but resilient, dangerous but inculpable. “Right away, you end up in a very uncomfortable position,” said Robert Corrigan, a New York City rodentologist who has studied urban rats for decades. “There’s no way to get out.”

The Schuelke brothers, along with a handful of employees, had been moving around the house in Culver City for about three hours, looking for rat nests and openings through which the animals could squeeze. The twins’ strategy was to close off every rat entry and exit point and lay traps around the house as the animals grew hungrier and more desperate.

But the whole place was compromised. Holes in the roof, the walls, the floors. The house’s owner, an 82-year-old woman named Ann Chung, said that she could hear rats underneath her at night. She expressed a kind of fondness for the animals — she was feeding them twice a day — and mentioned that, in some countries, there are temples dedicated to rats. (For instance, the Karni Mata Temple in India.) But they were now shredding her collections of newspapers, books and clothes and staining her carpets twice over with urine and grease. “I am defeated in life, in everything now, because of these rats,” Ms. Chung said.

In Culver City, the Schuelke twins caught four rats. One was snapped in a Victor trap in the garage during the night, its neck sliced by the razor blade. Two more were sucked into the Twin Ratvac in the living room. The fourth came as the brothers and two employees were cleaning up the kitchen on the second day of the job. As they moved the refrigerator, a rat jumped out from behind, and one of the employees sucked it up into a bucket with a vacuum.

The four men brought the bucket with the rat outside and opened the top. There was an inch of gray liquid at the bottom. The rat was wet, clawing at the smooth walls around it. One of the employees picked it up by its tail as Dave got a couple of close-up shots with his camera. The day was sunny, and a child was playing on a tire swing next door.

The Schuelkes often get comments on their YouTube videos shaming them for profiting from killing rats. “Which kind of makes sense in a way,” Dave said. “But in the same token, there are too many rats and they need to be killed.” He noted that he could try to save every rat he found and drive it 30 miles away. But how could he run a business doing that? And what other sorts of environmental damage would that do? “I’m not a believer in saving rats,” he said. “I don’t have a heart for them. ’Cause they’re nasty.”

After capturing the rat footage, Dave returned the animal to the bucket. His brother and employees went back to cleaning up the house. Dave stared at the rat and picked up a wooden two-by-four, painted white, that was lying on the ground. He located the rat’s head and crushed it with the short end of the beam. “I don’t want it to suffer,” he said, as he pushed down with all his weight. The rat struggled for a moment, then stopped. “Poor guy,” Dave said, and gave the beam one last push for good measure.