Rats On The Run In Pioneer Square -- City's Rodent War Escalates And Draws Some Criticism

The war against the Pioneer Square rats has escalated on two fronts.

Park Department workers collapsed rats' nests and baited burrows with poison, and yesterday the roof was literally ripped off some of the rodents' homes next to the wrought-iron fence of the triangular park at First Avenue and Yesler Street.

Using a boom truck, workers lifted five hexagonal concrete planters on dirt the rats had been burrowing in - a move designed to shake up their world and force them to move elsewhere, said David Powell, pest-control operator at the Woodland Park Zoo.

The planters were relocated on concrete areas around the park.

But while Pioneer Square patrons and employees of neighboring office buildings may be applauding the efforts, the Northwest Animal Rights Network is alarmed. Poisoning the rodents is inhumane, a network spokesman said.

"We just think killing the rats is putting a Band-Aid on a canker sore," said Wayne Johnson, a Seattle family counselor and member of the animal-rights group's board.

Johnson said the answer lies in working vigorously with health officials to enforce sanitation at neighboring restaurants, pursue cleanup and police garbage to remove the animals' food supply.

"We volunteered to help in whatever way we could with cleanup of public space down there," Johnson said.

The latest Pioneer Square rat alarm was sounded about a week ago by people who complained that the rodents were frolicking around the park's planters and the totem pole, said Chuck Kleeberg, director of environmental health for the Seattle-King County Health Department.

Jeff Everest, environmental-health supervisor under Kleeberg, said the reason the rat population has gotten out of hand there is because there are a lot of food scraps on the ground - pieces of pizza and deli sandwiches from people who eat lunches there, as well as food the homeless consume from food kitchens and missions in the area.

"In this case, we can't eliminate the food source," Everest said.

The problem is compounded by homeless people relieving themselves in alleys and streets, Everest said.

Kleeberg agrees that enforcing sanitation and removing food sources are important, but the rat population there is so high and the availability of scraps and garbage so plentiful that they would only shift to another downtown area.

"If we live-trapped them, where would we take them that people wouldn't be upset?" Kleeberg said. "If we cut off the food source, it wouldn't stop them. They would just migrate to other areas around Pioneer Square."

The answer is some eradication along with sanitation enforcement, Kleeberg said.

"Rigorous sanitation enforcement is the more effective way to go," Johnson countered. "All we're doing is temporarily appeasing the public and giving them the illusion of dealing with the problem."

But Powell, who is involved in the Park Department's continuing pest-control program, said,"eradication doesn't work; the object is to control them."

Johnson said that poisons like strychnine "cause agony for the rats and do nothing to get at the heart of the problem."

The bait being used "is relatively painless," Powell said. It is called Talon G, a single-dose anticoagulant, which kills the rodents by causing internal bleeding.

On the wider rat problem, Health Department officials said that about once a month they receive complaints of rats appearing in toilet bowls at residences.

"We have a map here in our office where we are trying to plot rat-toilet complaints," Everest said. They are pretty spread out, he observed.

Kleeberg said some more affluent neighborhoods, like Laurelhurst, which have older sewer systems that rats can breach, report more toilet incidents than poorer areas. One reason is that there are more garbage disposals in affluent neighborhoods. Ground-up vegetables flushed down sewers by garbage disposals provide a "wonderful nutrient harvest" for the rats, he said.

When a toilet complaint is received, Engineering Department workers will go out and bait sewers in a one-block radius of the house where the rat was reported in a toilet bowl, Everest said.

Everest said any resident who has a rat-toilet incident should call 296-4632.