2/14/2011 Meet Lola: London’s Bedbug Sniffing Wonder Dog
I don’t like dogs as a rule. But as the Jack Russell is released from her cage into my hallway I’m pinning my hopes on her. “Run, Lola, run!” I whisper as she darts towards the living room. For this is a dog with special powers that I’m hoping can bring to an end a painful chapter in my life.
Lola was born on a farm in Wales two years ago, bought soon after by entrepreneur Mark Astley, and sent to America to get an education. After a few months at the made-up sounding National Entomology Scent Detection Canine Association, she started work in London’s hotels and homes. She has the distinction of being the only certified bedbug sniffer dog in Europe.
So how did this highly trained animal come to be rootling around my Tooting front room?
Back in September at the height of the panic in New York over a bedbug plague, I wrote a piece for the BBC. It was based on a survey of a thousand pest control firms suggesting that the bedbug problem was becoming, in the words of Missy Henriksen of America’s National Pest Management Association, a “bedbug pandemic”. The one ray of hope in all this apocalyptic talk was the arrival of Lola, who had begun working for Trust K9, the firm founded by Astley. But I never thought that a few months later I’d be asking for Lola’s help.
It was in December that I first started to itch. After a few days away over Christmas, I came back and the bites multiplied. Clearly whatever it was had been missing my blood. Soon the red marks turned to scabs, which bled at inconvenient moments. But still I wasn’t sure. Maybe it’s an allergy, fleas or something else, I thought.
“Go and get your Bs!” Astley commands Lola using their code – hotels don’t like clients hearing about bedbugs. On a lead she pulls her handler around the living room. Her white face with its splodge of brown around her right eye is the epitome of cuteness but her eagerness makes her resemble a Heathrow sniffer dog trying to impress a visiting Home Secretary. After a few minutes, Astley is satisfied. The room is clean. At this point he shows us what Lola would have done had she found something. He hides a vial of live bedbugs in the sofa when she’s not looking but within 15 seconds Lola has detected the smell, pounced, and is pawing deep under the cushion.
Where dogs win out over humans is in picking up an infestation early before visual clues such as blood spots appear. However, it’s not cheap, with a callout costing £275. But for hotels or people with large rambling homes, Lola makes sense.
“Dogs seem to be working well,” confirms Richard Moseley, technical manager at the British Pest Control Association (BPCA). “Of course it depends how well-trained the animal is but the benefit is it can check a large area in a short time with a minimum of pesticides.”
As Lola approaches my bedroom she arches her back and tugs at the lead. “From her behaviour there’s a lot of [bedbug] scent in this room,” Astley translates. She does a few laps of the bed, sniffs the skirting board, then leaps up onto the bed and buries her nose in the duvet. “Because you’ve had bugs in here for a while, the whole room smells of them. She’s trying to find the greatest source,” he explains.
Then Lola’s up by the pillows and pawing frantically between the mattress and headboard. Bingo! She doesn’t physically unearth a bug – her skill is to give a positive ID of the smell. “Good girl,” Astley shouts in a decent approximation of the late dog trainer, Barbara Woodhouse. Lola barks in triumph and leaps up to receive a handful of biscuity treats.
I’m relieved. You can put up with it for a while. But in the past month I’ve started to regard my bed with disgust. Then two weeks ago I found a bedbug in a clean T-shirt I was about to put on. It was light brown, wafer thin, and about the size of an apple pip. More and more my life seemed to be dominated by the little blighters. When I met my girlfriend’s father for the first time the other day he lifted up his shirt to show me the bites on his belly. As if acting out some primitive ritual, I responded by pointing out the scabs on my arm and neck. The following evening at the cinema there was so much scratching going on around me that it was hard to concentrate on the movie. I even happened to hear Radio 3 playing Shostakovich’s The Bedbug. “It sends people a little bit loopy,” agrees Astley. “And it breaks couples up. Often one of them is suffering more than the other and one says the other’s paranoid and it destroys things.”
The rest of the flat turns out to be clean. So where have these bugs come from? It could have been second-hand furniture, on our clothes or in a carrier bag. With rumours rife that the Tube is infested we decide to take Lola for a trip on the Northern line. When we board the train at Tooting Broadway a man is sleeping at the far end. He wakes bemused to see a Jack Russell sniffing the blue upholstery of the carriage. Lola appears to find something at the penultimate seat. It’s not conclusive proof this time, however. Astley says she’s a little hesitant and may be distracted by all the attention from the Standard’s photographer.
While one bedbug operative in the capital does put the blame squarely on the Northern line for outbreaks on its route through south London, a senior figure in the pest control industry who didn’t want to be named said the problem wasn’t confined to one section of the Tube network. “I’m aware of the Northern line having a problem but it’s not just one line, it’s the Piccadilly line, Central line and others as well. Just as with the outbreak in New York, anywhere like the Tube could transfer bedbugs on to people,” he said. He added that Transport for London had been made aware of specific outbreaks but had failed to give complainants evidence that it had taken action to resolve the problem.
According to the BPCA’s Moseley, bedbugs are known to inhabit aircraft seats and overhead lockers from where they can get into people’s luggage or clothing. The same was theoretically possible on the Tube, he said. Clive Boase, a British entomologist who runs the Pest Management Consultancy, urged people not to overreact: “I’m not saying there aren’t any bedbugs on the Tube but it’s far from common.” Pest control firm Bed-bugs.co.uk takes a more robust line in its literature and cites “public transport” as one of the most common sources of infestations. In the “Control Steps needed” for minimising the risk on public transport, it advises: “Do not sit down. Stand or get a shooting stick.”
It’s a relief to have my own bedbug problem confirmed. Astley can now prepare for the next stage – heat treatment, which costs an eye-watering £1,200 and involves moving everything on his proscribed list out of the affected room (including all food, plants, aerosols, old plasma TVs but not necessarily artwork). If you’re desperate, it may be worth it. For, unlike pesticides, which can take three weeks to kill the bugs, very high temperatures kill instantly. By the time you read this, my flat will be an oven-like 57 degrees Celsius thanks to three strategically placed heat exchangers. If all goes to plan, it’ll be roast bedbugs all round tonight. For the first time in a long while, I’m looking forward to getting into bed.
DON’T LED THE BEDBUGS BITE
The common bedbug (Cimex lectularius) feeds on blood, preferably human. It is mainly nocturnal and, since it takes 5-10 minutes to finish feeding, you are usually bitten while asleep. A single feed can sustain a bedbug for 5-10 days and it can go without food for months.
If carried into the home, a female can lay about 200 eggs over its lifetime, five or six eggs a day.
Be aware that bedbugs can live in carpets, sofas, skirting boards and picture frames. Don’t allow clutter to build up, particularly where you sleep. Don’t take in second-hand beds or mattresses.
Natural predators include ants, spiders, moths – and cockroaches.
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