The Lanes can’t wait to go rat hunting again on Monday.
In the last two years, the homeschooling farm family from the Lincoln County town of Jefferson has traveled to 30-plus Maine farms and even a restaurant to do just that, bringing their specially trained dogs Echo and Finn to hunt and kill dozens of rodents in a couple hours.
“These dogs know their jobs, and they enjoy every minute of it,” Kymberly Lane said Friday.
Lane, her husband and five children got started “ratting” after the pigs they raised on their own small dairy, Littlefoot Farm, started drawing the destructive rodents. Shooting them with a .22 wasn’t effective, and the rats were too smart to fall for traps consistently.
Lane had seen videos online of ratters from neighboring states, then learned from a Bucksport farmer how to train her own. Soon, she was flooded with requests to visit other farms, and it’s kept the family busy since.
It’s a traditional solution to a long-running, apparently increasing problem for Maine farmers, homesteaders and businesses alike: rodents destroying their buildings, tunnelling under their property and killing their poultry.
Residents have battled rat infestations for years using tactics ranging from pellet guns to electrocution boxes to guillotine devices in sewer lines.
The Lanes are some of the only Mainers using their pets to fight back, an approach they believe is both a beneficial return to the dogs’ breeding roots and a uniquely effective method for helping to cut down rat populations.
“It’s a really neat place in the modern world where the old techniques and skills can come in handy,” said Patricia Mey, the farmer who teaches rat training courses at LoudDog Farm on the Bucksport/Orrington town line at Betts Road.
People today often don’t realize that their pet dogs need jobs to do, she said, but it’s simple to add new commands on top of basic obedience training. For ratters, that means working on recall, focus and developing their skills identifying and killing rodents.
Rats are often drawn to homesteads by livestock feed, garbage or water sources and find nesting spots in pallets, stacks of wood or chicken coops on the ground. They dig mazelike tunnel systems, destabilize building foundations, get into walls, chew through wood, damage electrical wiring and eat chicks and ducklings.
“They come in and just destroy whatever you’ve worked so hard to build,” Lane said.
Ratters typically work in small packs to sniff out their nests and kill them with bites to the back of the neck once humans have flushed them to the surface. When the Lanes are at work, Echo sniffs and Finn catches, sometimes joined by another family’s dogs on larger jobs.
It’s a high-energy family bonding experience: the adults help run the dogs, their children assist with shoveling and flooding tunnels while keeping an eye out to retrieve rats from the dogs’ jaws, homeowners watch and the ratters themselves are in the zone.
“They just love what they do,” Lane said, describing them as “completely different dogs” when they’re working.
But, she cautions that dogs aren’t a complete solution; people should secure animal feed, manage the habitat in their yards and set out rat birth control to help manage future populations, with visits from the dogs to help cut down the numbers.
The Lanes have visited some farms multiple times, and will sometimes visit or work with neighbors too – rats tend to move on when they run out of food or spread out from one property to another.
The family’s travel is limited by their milking schedule, which makes it difficult to get north of Bangor. Lane would like to see more rat dog services fill the void for northern and eastern Maine.
Mey, the trainer and farmer in Bucksport, has seen some increase in interest lately; she’d like more of it. But, she cautions that potential rat dog trainers should learn from an expert, be prepared to humanely kill any rats the dogs don’t finish off and know first aid themselves, as the rodents can be vicious.
The experience has also brought the Lane family around Maine’s agricultural community as business grows by word of mouth.
Ratting costs $50 per hour per dog, but the family often barters for their services instead – the old Maine way, Lane said. That’s brought them resources they wouldn’t have otherwise.
With more Maine farms going out of business, especially dairy farms like her own, she added that the family wants to do what they can to help the agricultural community through rat control.
“It’s a Mainer thing,” she said. “Love your neighbor, help them out.”