Joe Shute
speaker
145 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 25 Jul
Joe Shute’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Rats do hear extraordinarily high frequencies.
One of the loveliest rat studies that I've read is about a group of scientists in Germany who were assessing whether rats would play for food or also just for affection and human contact as well.
And these researchers would tickle rats.
They'd play hide and seek with them.
And when they caught the rats, they'd tickle them as a reward.
And they used these high frequency detectors to monitor what the rats were doing.
And they found out that the rats were giggling when they were tickled.
And they were kind of shrieking with delight.
But it's the sound that's inaudible to the human ear.
In terms of how to get rid of them, it's very difficult.
And I've spoken to a lot of rat catchers about this.
They say there's a real push now against chemicals and rodenticides, which for a lot of the past century was the go-to measure that your average exterminator would do.
You'd call them in and they'd put lots of toxic blue pellets around, the idea being that the rat would eat those pellets and die and that would deal with your problem.
actually that is now being found to not just have catastrophic impacts on wider ecosystems because rats are a food source as well as being omnivores themselves.
They're a food source for a huge range of species
that some might really surprise you for example herons those stately wading birds of riverbanks and ponds will think nothing more of gulping down a live rat in their beaks and swallowing them and if you don't believe me you can watch many videos on youtube just don't do it before you've had your lunch if you just poison rats then
more rats will come and replace them.
The general consensus is that you need to change the landscape in which the rats are getting in.
So you need to patch up holes, you need to put sort of things like steel wire, you need to stuff into burrows where rats might be getting in.
If there's a food source, like you have rats around a bird feeder or
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