Rat infestation spreads across countryside near Fayetteville. Can anything be done?

Mitchell Hardin’s 30-year-old son Timothy was in bed asleep several months ago when he thought he felt the family cat walking across his feet in the night.

It wasn’t the cat.

“He woke up, it was the rat,” Mitchell Hardin said.

A feral rat. Rats had gotten into the walls of the Hardins’ home and gnawed a hole through the sheetrock to get into the house, Hardin said. The incident led him to spend $125 on rat poison, and he has been killing the rodents around his property since.

The rat in Timothy Hardin’s bed is one of thousands of rats that residents say have infested homes, corn and soybean fields, and other property in southeast Hoke County between Dundarrach and Lumber Bridge. This is about 20 to 30 minutes outside of Fayetteville and Hope Mills.

Residents of this “Hamelin Town” say the rats have damaged property, stripped ears of corn bare in the cornfields, and contaminated hay and animal feed with urine and feces. In late July, flattened rat bodies littered the roads in the area with dozens of gray, brown and white smears of bloodied fur on the asphalt. More rat body remnants were piled up on the roadsides.

“They’ve been coming on for several months,” said Carol Burnette. “But boy, they invaded — what was it — two weeks ago.”

Burnette has a large dog, a Great Pyrenees, that chases the rats. When a rat got under her husband’s minivan, the dog ripped off the front bumper, she said. When a rat climbed onto a tire of her car, the dog bit the wheel well and fender, leaving scratches and dents.

‘Covered up in rats’

A photographer and a reporter for The Fayetteville Observer visited Fourth Rock Stables on July 26 to see the rat infestation. A rat they cornered in a hayloft climbed up the reporter’s arm and head, then leaped off his shoulder to make its escape. It was one of 10 rats seen scurrying around in Fourth Rock’s horse stables in about an hour.

The live rodents in the barns and the dead ones on the roads appeared to be around eight inches long, some bigger, some smaller, not including their tails.

The rats were quick — as soon as lights were turned on or the creatures realized they were near a person, most zipped away in a blur of fur to find a place to hide.

“I’ll say, we’re covered up in rats,” said Chuck Marrs, who operates Fourth Rock Stables with his wife, Alison. They have lived on McNeill Lake Road for nearly 25 years, they said, and have never had a rat problem until now. They encounter rats in the stables at night and in the mornings when they are tending to the horses.

The couple have been battling the rodents around their stable buildings and around their house every day since July 13, they said. They have learned to carefully approach, when they spot one, to avoid frightening it into running away before they can kill it.

And then: A chop with a bush ax. Another dead rat.

A smash with a muckrake. Another dead rat.

A stab with a pitchfork. Another dead rat.

A shot from a BB gun. Another dead rat.

A taste of rat bait. Another dead rat.

Marrs said on Tuesday they had killed 60 to 65 since July 13.

The rats got into the hay and horse feed, he said, and some drowned in the horses’ water buckets. One injured a horse’s face, he said, and the horse has since taken ill and incurred veterinary bills. Rat tunnels go under the walls and into the horses’ stalls. Saddles show damage where the critters have climbed on them and chewed on the leather.

Chuck Marrs estimated he and Alison have spent $3,000 to $5,000 to deal with the rats. This includes $450 on rat poison, plus replacement hay, plus the fuel cost from extra mowing of their property to keep the grass short to help hungry hawks and owls spot the rats.

Did the rats come from industrial chicken farms?

Chuck and Alison Marrs think the rats came from a cluster of three industrial chicken farms about a mile from their property that they said were built several years ago. The farms raise chickens for the Mountaire Farms poultry company, which has a chicken processing plant a few miles away on N.C. 71 in Robeson County between Shannon and Lumber Bridge.

The three farms mass produce chickens in 48 giant buildings — each approximately 60 feet wide and 600 feet long. Chuck Marrs said an employee from Mountaire told him each building holds 36,000 chickens.

That works out to more than 1.7 million chickens being raised all at once among the 48 buildings. In modern chicken farming, most chickens are raised in buildings like this, and their droppings and other wastes build up over time.

Eventually, the wastes need to be cleaned out.

If the rats were in the chicken houses, a recent cleanout could be what pushed them to neighboring and nearby properties, said Liz Joseph, the interim director of the Hoke County Cooperative Extension Service.

“I know that they did a whole-house cleanout, and that was kind of when the rat problem escalated,” she said.

Mountaire says rats sought refuge from flooding

Mountaire sent an employee to talk to residents about the rat issue, Marrs said, and the company offered to provide exterminator service for a year. The exterminator set six traps at the stables this past week, and they killed five rats in a day, he said.

Several efforts by The Fayetteville Observer to contact a Mountaire Farms spokesperson by telephone and email since late July were unsuccessful. The News-Journal newspaper of Hoke County reported on July 26 that Mountaire said flooding in the area caused the rat problem.

“All farms have a rodent control program in place, but it was clear that recent heavy rains and flooding of a nearby stream had forced rats to seek shelter in and around the chicken houses,” says the statement Mountaire gave to the News-Journal. “Our team provided additional bait and traps immediately and the exterminator was there on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to make sure the traps were working.”

The News-Journal reported Mountaire said the chicken houses are empty and the company would not restock them until it is confident it has resolved the situation.

Marrs scoffed at the suggestion that rain caused the rat infestation.

Can state regulators help the rat victims?

The state Department of Environmental Quality and the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services sent people to investigate, Marrs said.

But if the rats came from the chicken farms, the Agriculture Department cannot help, a spokeswoman told The Fayetteville Observer.

“We did a site visit but determined we did not have any regulatory authority regarding the rats,” spokeswoman Heather Overton said. “Our regulatory authority is the disposal of livestock and poultry which did not appear to be the cause of the issue.”

Spokesman Josh Kastrinsky of the Department of Environmental Quality said an inspector visited the area, but state law prohibits his agency from further discussing the situation.

Democratic state House Rep. Garland Pierce of Scotland County represents Hoke County, and he visited the area on July 27 to survey the situation and offered to do what he could to help.

“I still believe that there’s some follow-up that needs to happen," Pierce said. “For the good of everybody — the farmer, the community, and everybody. … Just to really see, really what happened.”

Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@fayobserver.com.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Hoke County, NC, residents battling massive rat infestation