More than 1,000 miles of irrigation canals and ditches thread through the Treasure Valley in Idaho, transforming what was once an arid and remote high desert into one of the most fertile and fastest-growing parts of the country.
They’re also a rat superhighway.
The suburbs around Boise are suffering from a rat explosion. Pest control operators in the state have reported record calls. Health officials have floated declaring a public emergency, and elected leaders are arguing over who should be responsible for a problem that stretches beyond any political border.
Most fingers are pointing west, toward California.
“Check your luggage before you move,” Brad Pike, the mayor of Eagle, Idaho, said during a recent City Council discussion.
He wasn’t entirely kidding.
The rodent problem became a public concern thanks largely to one person, the retired naturalist and Eagle resident Jane Rohling. Around 2022, she started noticing rats in her backyard, a suburban idyll with raspberry bushes, cherry and apple trees and several bird feeders — a veritable rat buffet.
“I looked out one day, and there were four rats right at the base of that feeder — in the daytime,” she said. “That meant I already had a problem.”
Ms. Rohling scrolled through the social media site Nextdoor and realized that everyone in Ada County, which includes Boise, had the same problem. She began calling her local elected leaders and posting on social media. Now the Nextdoor group she founded for Boise-area rat sufferers has more than 1,200 members.
Idaho has few native rat species, so the appearance of Norway rats and roof rats in gardens, chicken coops and crawl spaces surprised biologists and pest control experts. Figuring out where they came from has been a popular, if unscientific, pastime in a region undergoing substantial growth and change, much of it driven by people leaving blue West Coast states for ultrared Idaho. Newcomers have brought dizzying change to Idaho. They’ve driven state politics further to the right, added to traffic woes and helped speed the replacement of farmland with subdivisions. Now rats?
Adam Schroeder oversees weed and pest management for Ada County and receives multiple calls a week about rats. Early on, he said, “every one mentioned California.”
Tracking rats is tough because the rodents shy away from new objects or changes in their environment, such as baited traps or researchers trying to tag their ears. Kaylee Byers, a public health professor at the University of British Columbia who studied the migration of the rodents in Vancouver, said rats have traveled with humans all over the world, made their nests in the hidden corners of our homes and eaten our food for centuries.
“Where you have people, you will have rats,” she said. The rodents, she added, “are a reflection of us.”
Rats also share an important trait with rabbits, another animal proliferating around Boise in such high numbers that the Idaho Humane Society has stopped accepting strays: They reproduce fast.
Female rats reach sexual maturity in a matter of months and can give birth to 40 or more pups a year. Milder winters stretch the breeding season through the entire calendar year in the Treasure Valley. The irrigation canals, built by settlers in the 1860s and expanded by the federal government in the 1900s, function, for rats, like sewer lines and subways in New York City.
Scott Rogers, the owner of Wild West Pest Control, recently took a call from a woman bewildered by rats in her home, which was clean and new. He suggested she walk outside and check how close her house was to a canal.
“Rats love areas that are just a little overgrown with vegetation, and they can swim,” he said.
Solutions are hard to come by. New York City appointed a “rat czar” in 2023 and recently created an Office of Rodent Mitigation. Washington, D.C., developed a rodent birth control pilot program using edible fertility-suppression bait.
Exposure to rat waste or saliva can cause a number of potentially serious illnesses in humans and animals, though roof rats and Norway rats typically do not carry hantavirus, the disease that has caught the world’s attention after killing three people aboard the M.V. Hondius. Rats can also do major structural damage to homes and businesses as they gnaw through wires and insulation; Ms. Rohling estimates she has spent more than $30,000 on repairs and prevention.
In Idaho, a state where small government is the rule, even figuring out who should play Pied Piper has become a political fight. Despite its booming economy, the state has struggled to keep pace with rising costs after years of tax cuts. Court precedents and the state’s Constitution sharply limit the powers local governments can exercise without approval from the Legislature.
During this year’s legislative session, a conservative Republican from the suburbs and a Democrat from Boise teamed up on legislation that would have declared rats a nuisance and created a clearer framework for state and local governments to respond. Debate over the proposals broadened into philosophical arguments over the role government should play in daily life and how to balance the needs of the entire state with those facing Boise and surrounding Ada County. The bills died.
Tammy Nichols, a Republican state senator whose district includes the western edge of Ada County, said many of her colleagues far from Boise “didn’t think this was their problem.” But, she added, “give it time, and I’m afraid they won’t have a choice.”
Kirk Dean, owner of a pest control company in Nampa, Idaho, and incoming president of the Idaho Pest Management Association, said his members worried that the public sector might set up a system that would compete with private operators. They also feared what they viewed as government overreach, with “government exterminators knocking on doors demanding to be let into people’s homes” if residents weren’t given an opt-out option.
Mr. Dean and other exterminators also say talk of a rat crisis is overblown, exaggerated by social media and news coverage.
“We don’t want rats in people’s homes, sure,” said Mr. Rogers, who wears a helmet shaped like a cowboy hat as he answers calls. “But this is also maybe a case of what happens when a few people get everybody else riled up.”
Locals resent becoming known for a pest problem — “People keep talking about ‘Eagle rats,’ which is just unfair,” Mayor Pike said — but they also worry about what a lack of action could mean.
Ada County leaders are trying to assemble an interim response, and Ms. Nichols plans to push again for a state fix during the next legislative session.
Meantime, the Treasure Valley’s rats are reproducing.
Anna Griffin is the Pacific Northwest bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of Washington, Idaho, Alaska, Montana and Oregon.
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