OWN CORRESPONDENT, Cape Town | Thursday
CAPE TOWN police and health officials have been left dumbstruck by the devastation wrought on a suburban home by more than 1_000 rats thought to have been taken from a laboratory and kept as pets.
Gwynneth Quick, 39, is under psychiatric observation while exterminators gassed the rodents, which had become a major health risk, police said.
”I have never seen such a sight in my whole career,” said police official Superintendent Amanda Hattingh. ”The house was full of rats. The skirting boards were eaten, the carpets were eaten, there were holes in the furniture and even in the wooden floors. There were more than a thousand of them in the house.”
Quick had asked to be admitted for observation after she tried to commit suicide while the police and health officials were in her house, Hattingh said.
Quick allegedly brought the rats home from the pharmacology laboratory at Stellenbosch University, where she worked part-time until September. However, the university denied that Quick took rats from their labs.
”She said she couldn’t handle the rats being killed and the tests being done on the rats and the way they were treated,” Hattingh said.
”It was weird. She had names for the rats and they really seemed to listen to her when she spoke to them. They were like her children.”
However, the rats bit Quick when the police and health officials were in the house and upset the rodents, she added.
Quick and her boyfriend had slept on a mattress on the floor of the sitting room from which all the rats – except one favourite – were excluded.
Pest control officers covered the house in a tarpaulin and gassed the rats in the house. Environmental health officer Rowland Rumbelow said the gassing of the rats had been speedy.
”It attacks their nervous system and causes paralysis. It is not a painful death as far as we know.” – Reuters