A Galway pest-control company is employing sniffer dogs to help people to ‘sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite’!
As well as using a Springer Spaniel to detect bedbugs, city-based West Pest also deploys two Jack Russell Terrier dogs to hunt rats and mice in homes, farms and businesses.
Cathal MacDocraigh, from Elphin, has specially trained three dogs to work at his pest control company in Shantalla.
The one-year-old Springer Spaniel specialises in bedbugs – blood-eating parasites that reside in beds.
“Most of the hotels we are contracted to have had other pest control companies in the past. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. But the dog just goes in and tells us exactly where they are in two seconds. The dog is trained to sniff the scent of the bed bug. It’s the same as a drug dog – it’s trained specifically to sniff bed bugs,” explained Mr MacDocraigh.
“We do a lot of work for hotels, who often get complaints from customers who say they have been bitten at night. So, what we do there is we just bring in the dog and the dog will tell us within ten seconds if there are bed bugs in that room. If there are bed bugs in that room, the dog will find the bed bugs for us, which means we don’t have to go spraying all of the room. Or five or six rooms.
“And we routinely check hotels, every five or six months, we go into hotels that we are under contract to, and put the dog through all the rooms to make sure there are no bed bugs in there. It saves a lot of time and money; it saves them beds, and cuts complaints.”
The company has two Jack Russell Terriers – also trained by him – who work in tandem to control mice and rats: One dog identifies where the vermin are, and a younger one is the ‘hitman’.
“The older dog has a specific bark for rats and a specific bark for mice. So, when I go to a house, if I don’t see any immediate signs of rodent activity, she will find it for us. And she’ll also find the entrance. The younger dog is specifically for killing. If we come in contact with rats, the older dog will flush them out, and the younger dog will kill all day long,” said Mr MacDocraigh.
A dog savaging a rat doesn’t sound very humane but Mr MacDocraigh insists it is far more so than conventional methods of pest control.
“If a rat goes into a trap, it takes up to 20 minutes to die. Our dog catches the rat by the neck, the dog shakes his head violently, which snaps the rats neck. That will kill it in three seconds. The other advantage of the dog is, if we go to a farm, say a hay shed where there’s rats, once the dogs go in and kills a few rats, the smell of the dead rats and the dog will deter other rats. There’s no way a rat is going to come back for six months,” he said.
West Pest does all sorts of call outs including in private homes, and even in cars, which is becoming a big problem.
“There’s an awful lot of wiring in cars nowadays, built with a by-product of soya, which is basically a food source for a rat. We get an awful lot of calls from people about rodents in their car. Basically, what we do is put a smoke bomb under the car, which flushes the rat out, and the dog kills it.
“In private houses, we just put the dog in. Traditional pest control companies use bait boxes, and they have to send a guy around every month, or two months or three months to check the boxes. All we do is let the dog out and the dog actually physically checks the bait boxes for us. If the dog doesn’t show any sign of activity, we don’t even have to check it. The dog is doing in five minutes what a pest controller might take 40 minutes.”
Mr MacDocraigh says “there is no rocket science” involved in what he does.
“We’re just working off the dog’s instinct. The trick is not to train the dog but to read what the dog is telling you. That’s the secret. That’s the mistake most people make who have a good dog. Anyone can train a dog, but it’s to be able to read what the dog is telling you . . . Once I give an individual house the all-clear, I show them how to do their individual pest control. Everything I do I explain why I am doing it and even people with the worst phobias in the world are now doing their own pest control.”
It’s not exactly a glamour job, so how does anyone get involved in pest control, and why? “I’m the great contradiction – I’ve always been an animal lover. That’s why I got into pest control. We’re not into cruelty. I’ve always been fascinated by animals and their behaviour. We try to be as humane as possible in this game,” adds Mr MacDocraigh.
West Pest’s three dogs are starring in Madra na nGael on TG4 next Tuesday, December 13 at 8pm.