Moving on unwelcome house guests (pests)...with compassion!

Having spent many years living in the "well-ventilated" old wooden Queenslander houses of Brisbane's inner suburbs, I am on pleasant terms with the crawling, flying, vermin community that shares our love of the leafy area.

From Uni student days when the Brisbane City Council's rat catcher arrived with his frenzied Terrier and condemned a metropolis of rats in the backyard shed, to huge flying cockroaches that so impolitely drop onto your lap with no care for the interruption.

I have always avoided chemical sprays due to allergies and as a long-time vegetarian I have not the heart to kill a creature.  At Biome, we believe in respect and compassion for all who share our planet, so dilemnas over pest control that are both non-toxic and humane are not new to us.

We once offered a product that attracted cockroaches to a sticky-glue mat that they never left!  We soon received a polite customer email pointing out that even though they are lowly cockroaches, they do not deserve to die such an inhumane death.  That was the end of those products, and rightly so.  Someone else explained that they not only catch cockroaches, but also unlucky geckos that stumble across them...eep. We do love to get our customer's feedback to help with the deliberations.

You can understand our excitement with this new product, Pest Free, a plug in device that controls rats and cockroaches by altering the electromagnetic field already contained within a building's structure. It is an Australian-made product with 15 years of history and University testing to validate its effectiveness.  Scientific testing shows that the influence of the electromagnetic force causes loss of appetite in vermin and increases thirst, thereby disrupting their normal behaviour and reproduction.  It is not an ultrasonic product and will not effect cats, dogs, birds, computers or the electricity flow in a building. 

Having recently dealt with a voracious house guest in a not-so humane way, we hold hopes for this device. We had tolerated the noisy scurrying of a sizeable rat as it went about its noctural activities in the roof, good naturedly replaced the plastic light fittings that it consumed and learned to lock away our food because if its penchant for midnight feasts. One pitch black night, however, the rat and I met our Waterloo.  As I blearily tended to a crying child, the rat - I guess as startled as I - leapt from the kitchen bench into my face.

I searched with no success for a humane catch and release product for a huge rat.  I visited the hardware store to peruse the extermination options, but as my mind played out the gruesome scene my knees buckled.  With no solution, and with heavy heart, I handed the task to my husband and asked to be kept in the dark about whatever tactics were taken.  The rat did move on...