Grinning widely, Tran Quang Thieu brandishes the day’s haul: 10kg of rats caught in rice paddies near Hanoi. A menace to Vietnam’s rice crop, the vermin are regularly trapped — and sometimes eaten.
In his village of Van Binh on the outskirts of Hanoi, Thieu and his team work night and day in the area’s rice paddies. They estimate that 20 percent of the annual grain crop is lost to hungry rats.
Rice is an essential part of the Vietnamese economy, which is the world’s second-largest exporter of the staple grain.
Photo: AFP
“We used to have to accept the loss of large chunks of our paddies — the rats destroyed it. It made us wonder why we bothered working so hard,” 46-year-old farmer Hoang Thi Tuyet said.
Rodents can be a determined enemy.
“It’s hard to trap them, they’re clever, they move fast and in Vietnam, there are 43 different species of rat to contend with,” Thieu said.
However, in 1998, Thieu had a breakthrough when he invented a new rat trap that was not only more effective than anything farmers had previously tried, it also works without bait, relying on extremely strong springs.
Thieu estimates that his traps and unique, rat-hunting methods have since killed millions of rats.
“The agricultural losses caused by rats are enormous, and these rodents can cause fires and explosions by chewing electric cables in houses and factories,” he said.
At least 500,000 hectares of rice paddy is lost to rats each year, out of about 7.5 million hectares planted across Vietnam, said Nguyen Manh Hung of the Institute of Agricultural Sciences.
“Rats cause hundreds of millions of dollars of damage, before we even mention the risk of communicable diseases,” he said.
So it is no surprise that Thieu — known as the “Rat King” for the trap that has made him a fortune — is an extremely busy man.
“We get requests to come and catch rats from all over the country, but we can’t take them all up, we just don’t have the time,” he said.
His five children have all joined the family business and between them now run six companies to trap rats. About 30 million of his traps have been sold and are used throughout Vietnam, as well as in China and Cambodia.
Thieu does not just sell them to rice farmers either, he has signed contracts to help hospitals, hotels, restaurants and schools exterminate the pests, and even the Hanoi police’s headquarters.
Over the past few years, the rat population has exploded in Vietnam due to a decline in the population of their natural predators: snakes and cats. Serpents and felines are popular delicacies and their widespread consumption — thanks in part to an increasingly affluent middle class — has allowed the rat population to grow unchecked.
For this reason, many local authorities are encouraging people to kill rats. In Thai Binh, authorities are offering farmers cash for rat tails as a means of encouraging them to kill the pests in a simple intervention that protects rice crops without using chemicals.
In addition, rat hunters can sell their bounty to restaurants. Paddy rats are widely consumed in the country and some of the ones captured by Thieu in his traps are sent to restaurants. Others are given to the farmers whose fields they are caught in, who either eat them or use them to feed their pigs or fish.
“For a long time we’ve eaten rat in Vietnam. Especially since the war, that was when people — mostly farmers — started eating them for want of other meat,” Thieu said.
Grain-fed paddy rats are a healthier animal than their city cousins and are prepared in a variety of ways nationwide, being often grilled or steamed with lemongrass.
“Rat meat is very oily, like suckling pig, and very rich in protein,” Do Van Phong said as he sat in a Hanoi restaurant with two large paddy rats on his plate.
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