If you notice a musty odor in your home or find pest droppings, it may be time to call in professional help.
Avoiding pests is always the preferred option, but try to use preventative measures when that’s not possible. Contact Rodent Retreat now!
These include barriers, sanitation, and targeted treatments. They should cause a minimum of harm to everything except the pest.
Prevention
Pests are unwanted organisms that damage crops, livestock, property or humans. They may also transmit diseases or interfere with natural ecosystems. Pest control is essential to protect public health by reducing the spread of disease, safeguarding agriculture and food supplies, preserving homes and businesses from damage, and maintaining ecological balance by preventing invasive species from disrupting native populations.
The goals of pest control are prevention, suppression, and, in rare cases, eradication. Preventing pests from occurring is the best way to reduce the need for pest control. This is especially important in outdoor areas where pests can be more difficult to control than in enclosed structures. It is also essential to consider the whole environment in which a pest exists when choosing a pest management strategy. A control tactic should be selected that causes minimal harm to everything except the target pest. This is known as “integrated pest management” (IPM).
Prevention includes taking steps to keep the pests out – such as keeping plants away from houses and other buildings, removing garbage regularly and repairing leaky faucets. It also includes stopping the pests’ access to food, water and shelter by eliminating their breeding grounds and overwintering sites. It also involves improving sanitation practices to keep the pests from spreading in urban and industrial settings, such as storing foodstuffs in tightly closed containers, cleaning waste bins frequently and separating organic material from non-organic garbage.
Other forms of prevention include introducing natural enemies that will kill or control the pests, such as birds, mammals and other predators; weeds, which out-compete the pests for nutrients; or parasitic insects, which live on or in the pests and cut down their numbers. The use of pheromones, which are chemicals that the pests emit and affect their behavior, can be an effective form of insect control.
The occurrence of a pest problem usually indicates that the environment is unsuitable for them. The use of IPM emphasizes treating only for observed and identified problems to limit the use of pesticides. Scouting and monitoring are key elements in IPM; they involve regular searches for pests, identifying and assessing their numbers and the damage they cause.
Suppression
A pest control strategy focuses on reducing a current pest infestation to a level that is acceptable. It is often combined with prevention to create a comprehensive pest management program. Sanitation practices help prevent and suppress some pests. These can include improving garbage collection, removing clutter, and limiting access to food and water for pests. Good sanitation also includes cleaning equipment and materials used in food handling. It is also important to eliminate the conditions that favor pest development. For example, weeds can be controlled by proper mulching and cultivation techniques. Good farm practices reduce the likelihood of carryover of crop pests from one field to another.
Predatory organisms, such as birds, bats, nematodes, and earthworms, can be natural pest control agents. For instance, releasing ladybugs to eat aphids can be a very effective way of controlling aphid populations. However, these organisms can only do so much. They cannot handle a huge pest population, and they do not always work well in indoor environments.
Chemicals and other toxic substances are often used in pest control, but they should be used only when necessary and with care. It is important to read and follow all product labels. These will provide detailed instructions and warnings on how to use the product properly, as well as potential hazards. Pesticides are sometimes combined with other controls such as habitat destruction and trapping, to increase their effectiveness.
A common practice in pest control is scouting or regularly searching for and identifying pests. This can be done by visual inspection or by monitoring damage. Scouting helps to identify continuous pests, which are nearly always present and require regular control; sporadic pests, or migratory or cyclical pests that need control on an occasional basis; and potential pests, or organisms that might become a pest under certain circumstances.
The goal of scouting is to determine when a pest population has reached the threshold level that requires control. A threshold is a point at which the pest’s damage or nuisance value becomes unacceptable, indicating that it is time to take action.
Eradication
The term eradicate was coined in the 16th century, and it came to mean “to pull something up by its roots.” It’s a verb with an extended family that includes words like exterminate, extirpate, and uproot. All of these synonyms imply destroying or uprooting something that has established itself, while eradicate stresses a more forcible removal than do the other synonyms.
The World Health Organization defines eradication as “the permanent reduction to zero of the worldwide incidences of infection caused by a particular agent as a result of deliberate efforts.” For example, the variola virus that causes smallpox has not been seen in humans since 1977 in Somalia, and the rinderpest virus has not been found in cattle since 2001 in Kenya. These diseases were declared eradicated because of the dedicated eradication campaigns led by WHO.
Eradication can be a difficult concept to understand. Infectious disease anthropologist Thomas Aiden Cockburn has defined it as “the extinction of the pathogen that causes the disease.” But eradication is hard to achieve because samples of both variola and rinderpest exist in the United States and Russia, and there are still a few strands of wild (not vaccine-derived) polio.
To eradicate something means to make it impossible for it to occur in a particular geographic region, and that requires a precise diagnostic tool that can be used globally. The problem is that the tool has to be sensitive enough to pick up any disease-causing agents and also easy to use so it can be applied by laboratories with a wide range of capabilities and resources. When that condition is met, the global spread of a disease can be rapidly slowed or stopped through other methods, such as vaccination, and the disease is considered eradicated.
Mechanical or Physical Controls
Rather than using chemical substances, mechanical or physical controls employ traps, barriers and other devices to kill or deter pests. From mouse traps and fly swatters to cedar planks that repel pantry moths, these methods usually require little maintenance and provide immediate results. Moreover, these methods don’t leave behind any chemical residue and are therefore considered more eco-friendly than their chemical counterparts.
Many natural forces affect pest populations, such as climate, natural enemies, availability of food and water, shelter and other resources, and the presence of predators. These factors can help control pests, so it is important to understand and utilize them when managing a pest problem.
Some natural features can limit the spread of some pests, such as mountains and large bodies of water that restrict the flight of insects. Likewise, other natural constraints can inhibit the life cycle of certain pests, such as the need for overwintering sites or a place to lay eggs. The availability of water is also crucial to the survival of many pests, so ensuring an adequate supply can prevent them from surviving long enough to cause unacceptable damage.
Other forms of physical or mechanical control include the use of barriers to exclude pests from areas, such as fences and screens. These can be made of wood, wire, plastic, concrete, steam sterilization of soil or a product such as Tanglefoot(r), which is a petroleum-based sticky material often used to make insect-resistant barriers. Some types of barriers are used in conjunction with other pest control techniques, such as mowing or tillage to destroy weeds before they set seed and to keep birds away from crops.
It is important to note that eradication of pests is rarely the goal in outdoor settings; prevention and suppression are typically the goals. However, eradication may be an option in some indoor situations, such as in health care or food processing facilities, where a particular pest can’t be tolerated. Also, eradication is sometimes attempted in order to test an approach for a new pest species that has not yet been established in an area.