During a conversation about the coronavirus, a neighbor exclaimed how she recently spotted a mouse in her kitchen. Her parents also were dealing with a rodent issue at their Edmond home. Meanwhile, a friend of mine across town told me the family cat kept showing his love for them by continuously bringing them its kills — all mice.
I called a pest expert, interested to find out if the COVID-19 situation and its lockdowns somehow correlated with increased rodent activity.
“In the nine years I’ve been tackling rodent issues, I’ve never had to handle so many residential rodent issues in such a small period of time,” said Edwin Conant, owner/operator of Oklahoma City-based Get’Em Pest Control. “They need to eat, too, and they know where to find food.”
Conant explained that all of the extra foodstuffs and provisions people bought at the beginning of the pandemic, coupled with the fact that restaurants weren’t operating and, thus, not throwing anything out, had caused an increase in residential rodent calls into his business.
How to make it through another coronavirus lockdown this winter
