Latest innovation in rat control

A new lure system is making pest control even easier for many New Zealand business owners.

New Zealand conservation company Goodnature has made another innovative move in the bid towards pest eradication by creating the revolutionary Automatic Lure Pump for rats. The lure device enhances Goodnature’s self-resetting A24 trap by removing the need to check traps as often.

Eleven rats were humanely killed at Rotorua Canopy Tours by the Goodnature A24 with Automatic Lure Pump.

The Automatic Lure Pump is the brainchild of Goodnature director and founder Robbie van Dam. “We developed these traps for the Department of Conservation, whose scientists told them that a resetting trap would enable vulnerable native species to recover in mainland islands,” says Robbie. “What limited the scale of those islands was the cost of labour to sustain constant control.”

The Automatic Lure Pump is a twin-chambered foil pouch with the lower chamber containing long life lure and the upper one empty.

A gas cell is activated in the upper chamber, which slowly pressurises during six months, causing fresh lure to extrude from the lower chamber across that time. It means the A24 trap is always attractive to rats throughout the period.

Reduced labour

Tested and endorsed by the Department of Conservation, the ALP combined with the Goodnature A24 trap reduces the labour maintenance cost of rat trapping by 90 per cent.

“The Automatic Lure Pump unlocks the true potential of the A24 self-resetting trap,” says DOC predator expert Darren Peters.

“It means with similar budgets we can protect significantly larger tracts of forest and, crucially, recover our species. A trap’s only as good as its ability to attract and then act.”

The lure-dispensing system reduces trap checks to just two per year, taking Goodnature’s constant rat control offering to a new level of ease – keeping your traps attracting the next rat rather than waiting for the trapper to return and refresh the lure.

Bay of Plenty orchardists Geoff and Leny Leong were early adopters of the Goodnature Automatic Lure Pump when they switched late last year from static lure bottles, which required monthly trap visits to their A24 automatic trap network.

Twice a year

“When we installed our A24 network at the end of 2015 we thought a monthly visit to refresh the lures was pretty good,” says Leny.

“But to only get around them twice a year now makes those monthly checks seem like a hassle. We would recommend the ALP to other orchardists.”

Gary Coker of Rotorua Canopy Tours has also been impressed with the ALP. The award-winning adventure tourism business deployed the timesaving devices late in 2016 on their 200ha Goodnature network in the Mamaku Range. “They’re awesome. I came back past a trap I’d set a week earlier and it had 11 dead rats under it.”

The Goodnature Automatic Lure Pump can be retrofitted into all A24 traps and is available as an individual trap consumable through Farmlands and PGG Wrightson stores. It now comes standard with the Goodnature A24 self-resetting trap.


0 Comments

There are no comments on this article.

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to make a comment. Login Now
Opinion Poll

We're not running a poll right now. Check back soon!