SWANSEA THE WORST AREA IN THE UK FOR RAT INFESTATIONS
Residents in Swansea the worst area in the UK for rat invasions have claimed there are thousands of "2.5 foot" rodents in their town.
Swansea recently gained the unwanted title as the country’s most rat infested area Recording more than 16,000 vermin call outs.
And one local claims she returned home from a summer holiday only to discover her three-bed home had been taken over by giant rats.
Donna Riley, claims the rats, some as long as two and a half foot, had eaten her son’s new bedroom carpet, chewed through her front door and demolished everything in her kitchen cupboards.
A year on, 50-year-old Donna says she is still plagued by the super rats that terrorise her street in the city’s Townhill area.
The mum-of-seven said they must have had a ton of poisoned bait put down in and around the house in the past year and every day, I’ll find dead rats. Some mornings, there’ll be as many as five.
But the vermin nest in neighbouring undergrowth, where they breed so prolifically she fears that the war on the rats can never be won.
She added: “There are literally thousands of them in there.”
“If you look over there early in the morning or late at night when there’s no people or traffic around, you can see the grass and bushes moving like the ground is alive. It is simply teeming with them.”
The angry local says the the problem is so bad she can no longer have any of her 13 grandchildren in the house and, recently, an electrician refused to continue with a rewiring job after seeing rats in the attic.
Donna said: “I got a call from his boss a couple of days later saying they wouldn’t be able to finish the job until the rats were gone. He said the young man who’d come round had contracted Weil’s disease and was really sick.”
I felt absolutely terrible and doubled my efforts to get rid of them. The pest control people put cameras in the wall cavities and put down more bait in the hot spots.
And every day, I was pouring bleach down the gaps in the floorboards and scrubbing every surface constantly.
She continued: “These bloody rats have completely wrecked my health and I’m still having to battle them every day. Sometimes it feels like an impossible fight.
The ferrets are helping, for sure. I think they are the only things these rats are afraid of.
But of course that means they are now terrorising others in the street. My neighbour had them crawling over his feet the other day.
OVERRUN
Nearby, in the same street, Helen Evans, 54, is also at the end of her tether with the rat crisis.
I’ve lived here for 20 years and it’s been a problem for as long as I can remember.
I’ve been on to the council all the time asking them to sort the undergrowth out so they can’t live there any more, but they do nothing to help us.
We are overrun with the bloody things. They’re everywhere.
They’ve given me insomnia because I lie in bed every night listening to them crawling around in the attic above my bed and in the walls.
I get pest control round every week and they put 5kg of poisoned bait down in the walls and in the attic.
“They’ve destroyed my garden shed, they’re in my kitchen, chewing through anything they can find. It’s a living nightmare.”
The mum-of-four added: “When they come back the following week, every drop has gone but I’m not sure it’s even killing them. I’ve heard this new breed of super rat is resistant to the poison.”
"I’ve seen the buggers - they are massive, almost a metre long from head to tail.”
“I saw one the other evening in the twilight and I thought it was a dog, it was so big. Then I saw it’s thin furless tail and realised it was a huge rat.”
“They’ve destroyed my garden shed, they’re in my kitchen, chewing through anything they can find. It’s a living nightmare.”
Helen said that since she took in a “ratter” dog - a cross between a Frenchie and a Staffie - there have been fewer visits from the unwelcome creatures.
She said: “He loves chasing them and if he catches one, he snaps its neck.
I used to be absolutely terrified of the rats, especially the massive ones, but in all honesty I’ve lived with this nightmare so long now I’m not scared of them any more.
Obviously I don’t like seeing them and I hate the droppings and the constant bleaching and cleaning, but I can look them in the eye now and think ‘You don’t scare me, you little s..t’.”
Throughout Swansea and in the towns and villages around the south Wales city, others were quick to voice their concerns about the burgeoning rat population.
In Brynmelin, one said: “I can describe what I saw outside a block of flats here as like a scene from a Steven King horror movie. There were so many rats, it looked like the undergrowth was alive. I don’t go to that area any more.”
Marc Williams said he regularly sees rats in Parc Tawe. “I’ve even seen them in broad daylight. They don’t even run away any more.”
The boss of a Swansea pest control firm, who asked not to be named, said “most parts of Swansea and the surrounding areas are now overrun with rats”.
He added: Before Covid, most of the rats, around 80 per cent, were concentrated in the city centre around cafes, restaurants and offices.
But during lockdown, they moved out to the residential areas in search of food and they seem to have stayed there.
They are highly intelligent creatures and they train their young to follow routes to feeding points. Rats never forget.
Bird feeders in people’s gardens are also making the problem worse because it’s an easy source of food for them.
The best thing the public can do if they want to be rat-free is take down their bird feeders and put their food waste and other rubbish in aluminium steel bins that you can buy for around 15 quid.