It started with one rat. It scampered across Maggie Kremin’s lawn on a warm summer day and disappeared into her flower beds. Kremin could hardly believe what she was seeing. She convinced herself the rodent was a mouse or a mole, until a neighbour spotted it, too, and pointed out the size and the unmistakable tail, scaly and hairless. “I didn’t have a clue where it came from,” said Kremin, 66, a devoted gardener with an immaculate backyard in Toronto’s Riverside neighbourhood, near the Don Valley. She has lived there for more than three decades and had never seen a rat before that day in 2016.That she and her neighbour believed they were dealing with a lone rat makes Kremin laugh now in the sheepish way people do after realizing they’ve underestimated a foe. That first summer, it appeared to be one. The next year brought several sightings and a rising sense of panic. Then came 2018 — or, as Kremin remembers it, the Summer of Rats.Kremin looked out her kitchen window one afternoon in May and saw a rat on her lawn, which was enough to dash her hopes for a rodent-free summer. Then she watched as two more emerged from her rosebush, like they were gathering for a party.Kremin and her neighbours mounted a defence, setting traps on their properties. All summer long she shuddered as the traps snapped shut — on one occasion, three times in an afternoon.“I stopped counting after 25,” she said. “We were overrun.”She spent the summer afraid to enter her backyard, reluctant to have her nephew’s small children over and terrified the rats would get into her house.Kremin and a neighbour have been writing to the city since the problem started, asking what can be done about the rats. Her trash and shed are well-secured. Her property is tidy, with no weeds or clutter that could provide harbourage and no loose trash offering sustenance. She feels confident the rats are not coming from her property, and wa ...
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