Rats Invade Ron Howards Beverly Hills Home!- Wheeler’s Pest Control

Rat control at affluent addresses In 1999, Director Ron Howard spent several weeks surrounded by rat droppings and pieces of gnawed fruit. No, he wasn't filming the remake of "Willard," the 1971 cult classic about vicious rodents. He was in a rat-infested mansion that he rented in the affluent Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood while filming another movie. It was so bad he had to store his cereal and cookies in the microwave, said Amy Blum, an attorney who represented Mr. Howard after the owner of the home sued him for breaking the lease. Mr. Howard countersued, calling the house "defective," and in March of the following rats year, he was awarded $605,000 by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury. Once concentrated in fields and crowded urban areas, the rat has started to invade some of the most affluent addresses in Los Angeles and Orange County. Calls for a rat exterminator in upscale Orange County, Calif., jumped 30% in the first quarter of that year compared with the year-earlier period. Now it’s 2015 and the rat control problem in Los Angeles and Orange County has seen similar increases in rat problem every year since. In Orange County the Grand Jury convened to study their rat problems. Four rats even scampered across a floor in the West Wing of the White House not long ago, in full view of the press corps. So why has a rat explosion turned up scampering into the lap of luxury? Urban rats reproducing at epidemic rates and now with or record drought, overcrowding in urban areas has induced them to trek, street by street, to suburban settings. Where all kinds of rats scavenge through the same alleys, the suburbs are easy street: lavish leftovers in flimsy plastic bags, high-end pet chow, birdfeeders everywhere, nice watered landscaping. Not to mention the food generated by the current craze for vegetable gardening and outdoor entertaining. Joining the city rats are field rats -- the same species, only country-bred -- displaced by the building boom. "Wheeler’s Pest Control, an exterminator company that specializes in rat control, gets a lot of hysterical calls to come out to Beverly Hills" says exterminator Daniel Wheeler. Daniel said,” lots of suburban homes get an occasional field mouse, but most well-heeled homeowners never expect to find real-live rats in their gardens, on their decks or in their homes. Daniel told of one such case when a homeowner in Brentwood opened her range to put in a roast for dinner and a large rat leapt out and ran under her frig. After calling Wheeler’s Pest Control extermination pro out we discovered that rats were nesting in the walls and had caused $35,000 in damage in her newly remodeled kitchen by gnawing through studs and wiring. Dan says,” don’t feel special if you come up with a rat control problem, they are everywhere and the problem is growing. It used to be that cities, counties and states could get money from the feds to help cover rat extermination programs. But that no more”! Give Wheeler’s Pest Control a Call if you have a rodent control problem. We’d be glade to help.