Yorkshire rat catcher says he gets hundreds of death threats because of his job

Kieran Sampler, 29, founded a Facebook page called Yorkshire Rat Pack where he shares jobs and supports other rat catchers. Since he started it in 2018, he's received hundreds of hateful comments from hunting saboteurs who disagree with his job role.

This includes people threatening to kill his four-year-old daughter with a sledgehammer and wishing that his mum “dies a slow and painful death”.

But Kieran - who estimated to have killed around 50,000 rats in his career - says he ignores all of the messages and just “takes it with a pinch of salt".

He said: "There's 67,000 people from all around the world who follow us on Facebook. There was someone from Scotland who phoned me and told me he knows where I live and that he was going to stab me in the head.

"We get loads of other messages - people tell me they are going to murder my daughter but I just take it with a pinch of salt.

"With my company, my address is online so you do get people messaging you asking why I'm doing this but stuff needs to be controlled. I take my job very seriously because there's a lot of diseases that I can pick up."

After he founded the Yorkshire Rat Pack Facebook page, Kieran founded his own business called Vermicure Pest Control, which covers South and West Yorkshire.

But he says he “understands” animals have to live so kills the rats in the “nicest possible way”.

The father-of-one said: "We understand everything has got to live but rats have a lot of disease and they can cause a lot of things. With our job, they are there to be controlled and I don't go around killing everything - it's just not in me.

"It's matter of preventing it. There's a lot of rats on farms and they can't have poison down because of the cattle, so that's when they call me. We go in with the Terriers and that's the quickest method ever to be honest, it's only a couple of seconds and they are dead."

Kieran, of Wakefield, avoids using tramps, which would keep the rodents in a wage, because he says this traumatises them. He instead has trained his two Lakeland Terriers Poppy and Penny to locate and kill the rats in the “most quickly and humane way possible".

Kieran said: "Some people use live tramps but they are inhumane - if you trapped me in a cage then I would be pretty annoyed and feeling very uncomfortable. That's how the rodents feel and I don't believe in that.

"If you are going to control things - then you need to sort them out there and then and there's no stressing with it. We've trained the Terriers to locate, dispatch and kill in the most quickly and humane way possible. Obviously we need to search and identify where the rats are and where there food source is from."