Fed II Star - January 8, 2006

REAL LIFE NEWS: MSG FROM THE R@ TRP

So you've got a rodent problem in your house: rats or mice are rampaging around, making your life a misery, and the only way to deal with the vermin is to trap them. You set up traps, baited with cheese or chocolate or whatever delicacies you think will attract the little blighters, in strategic places around your infested home, and then you wait for the traps to do their work.

But how do you know when a trap has been sprung, and captured one of the enemy? You need to know this, because you have to remove the dead rodent and rebait the trap again. If you don't, the rodent corpse will start to decay with all kinds of unpleasantness ensuing. Prowling from room to room to check on the traps regularly is a chore; and anyway, having to handle the dead creatures is a bit... well... unsavory... even if they haven't started to rot.

And then what can you do to make sure that family pets or the fingers of inquisitive children don't accidentally get caught in the traps?

So here's an idea that solves all these problems: it's a rat trap that sends out a text message to summon a pest controller. The idea comes from UK pest control firm Rentokil, which commissioned two companies to build the trap - Wyless of London and Radio-Tech of Epping, Essex. The brief they were given was for a trap that would kill only target animals, in a humane manner, and then alert a pest controller that the trap needed attention.

Inside the trap, a pressure pad senses the weight of an animal's paw and closes the door if the footfall matches the weight of a rat or a mouse. Squirrels or small rabbits are spared - and presumably so are the wandering hands of infants. Gas released from a carbon dioxide capsule then kills the rat or mouse humanely. Once it's been let off, a built-in cellphone unit (the equivalent of a mobile phone without a microphone, display or speakers) txts the nearest pest controller.

Nigel Binns, Rentokil's chief biologist, reckons computer data systems will be among the major users of this new trapping system, because vermin often gnaw the warm cables running under the floors. "The rats have caused massive network failures in such places," he says. "Constant monitoring will lessen the chance of that happening."

Brilliant!