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The professional pest management industry has long spoken of embracing integrated pest management (IPM), and even moving on to assessment-based pest management (APM). It is reflected in countless convention seminars, trade magazine articles and postures taken by pest management professionals (PMPs) in the presentations of their companies.
In the effort of training our technicians to employ IPM practices while providing rodent control, we — Kurt Treftz, ACE, of Cascade Pest Control and Luke Rambo, ACE, of Rambo Total Pest Control — have noticed that referring to “bait stations” assumes baiting will blindly occur. We want our technicians to move above automatic responses and take a moment on each account to “think” IPM.
This could mean other solutions in addition to, or even instead of, a rodenticide bait. Snap traps, glue boards, tracking powder or monitoring baits might be preferred in a given situation. As a result, we have determined to make a small but meaningful change in our respective company cultures by specifically referring to these “boxes” as rodent stations, not bait stations. We could even go a step further and call them pest stations or IPM stations, reflecting that we can monitor other pests beyond rodents that are captured by these devices.
Because rodent stations are typically employed around the exterior perimeters of homes and commercial buildings, the benefits of IPM in performing rodent control provide a significant measure of safety to people, pets and wildlife. This effort is also particularly helpful around concerns about raptors.
We have found that this small and simple move helps us with both our initial training and our ongoing efforts to employ IPM while performing rodent control. This being the case, we invite the pest management industry at large to adopt this stance to further the practice of IPM and safeguard non-target pets and wildlife.
