Meet the Rat Buster, YouTube Sensation and Grim Reaper of Farm Rodents
The Rat Buster cometh. In the pitch-black of a barn at midnight, surrounded by hundreds of tiny pairs of glowing orbs—rat eyes illuminated by the wonder of a thermal scope, Jeff Pybus squeezes a rifle trigger and fires a .22 pellet 25 yards through the head of a 1-lb. rat. With the soft click of a sidelever, he stays on the scope, zeroes on a second rat, and sends another pellet into its brain. Simple math and steady rhythm: one shot per kill, for a tally of 200 rats within hours.
Against the scratching and chattering of a rodent horde reaching biblical numbers, Pybus is an invisible reaper, racking up prey in the dark as he cocks, shoots—and films. His role as a one-man pest control service has exploded into a first-person-shooter YouTube channel, featuring addictive, no-frills footage of rat hunts on farming operations. Fish in a barrel; rats in a barn.
“My adrenaline starts to pump hard when the thermal turns the night into day and I see countless rats all around me that sometimes run up my leg, jump on my shoulder, or move across my feet,” Pybus describes. “It’s a hunt from another world.”
Down the Rat Hole
A lifelong small game hunter in northeast England, Pybus was unexpectedly pulled into the rat realm by the cancer-related death of a close friend and brother-in-arms, Colin Mann. From a hospital bed two weeks prior to his death in 2015, Mann gave Pybus a parting gift.
“Colin was a very, very good mate for my entire life,” Pybus explains, his voice coated in a thick north Yorkshire accent. “Right before he died, Colin told me, ‘Go to my house and get something I want you to have. It’s in the cupboard behind the refrigerator. It’s a rifle and it’s yours now.’”
Pybus declined the gift of a BSA Supersport: “No mate, I can’t take it. I’ll sell it for you, but I can’t take it.”
Mann insisted: “You take it. You use it.”
Treasured by Pybus today, the BSA became the doorway to a wild chapter in his life. He went down a rat hole and never emerged.
Body Count 480
Roughly twice a week at dusk, Pybus arrives at a given farm to set up for a shoot. Wearing cargo pants, lightweight mud boots, and a dark, collared shirt emblazoned with a “Rat Buster” logo, Pybus, 54, conducts a quick recon, checking for equipment or livestock impediments. “You’ve got to take a look around every time, even if it’s a familiar barn, because if it’s been loaded with equipment and you’re dealing with hundreds of rats, there won’t be enough room to make kills in high numbers,” he notes.
His current weapon of choice is a Weihrauch HW100 rifle set at 11.7 foot pounds of pressure—German engineering at its best. The gun slings a .22 pellet clean through a rat—the rough equivalence of a fist-sized cannonball blasting through the human body. “Each magazine holds 14 pellets and sometimes I shoot six magazines in 10 minutes. My recharge bottle is converted for 300 shots per fill, and that way I don’t have to go back to my vehicle for extras except on an extremely heavy night.”
On most evenings, Pybus enters a barn, turns on the thermal, and waits a full 10 minutes in a standing position, rifle resting on a shooting stick. When he pulls the trigger, the streak of a pellet flashes onscreen and a rat drops. “The most consistent question I get is whether I’m shooting bb’s,” he says with a chuckle. “People see the tiny flash and are convinced it’s a bb, but I’m most definitely shooting .22 pellets, plenty powerful to kill two rats in one shot.”
“I’m very quiet, waiting in the dark,” Pybus continues. “If the rats see you right at the beginning, they’ll move along. But once the shooting starts, I’m looking first for a headshot, with a body shot as second choice, but either way, they’ll drop whether they run or not because the pellet causes decimating trauma to the rat’s body.”
The majority of Pybus’ kill shots range between 15-20 yards, sometimes extending to 40 yards, depending on the size of the farm building. “I’d say 15-20 yards is optimal for the camera focus for YouTube viewers. Closer is difficult to capture and further is not clear enough.”
Once the shooting gets hot, Pybus loses sense of time—a genuine problem he remedies by setting an alarm several hours into a hunt. “I literally don’t notice the clock because everything happens so fast, especially on a new farm where there’s a serious infestation and I can go five or six hours,” he laughs. “If I don’t put on the alarm, sometimes the whole evening rolls by and I’ve forgotten to go home.”
What is Pybus’ biggest one-night tally? 480 rats on the nose, killed at a recycling plant. “I’ll never forget that night,” he says, “where I was surrounded by thousands of rats. I started with a 500-pellet tin that I’d used exactly 20 from the previous night. Therefore, I knew I had 480 pellets going in. I never missed, right down to the last pellet.”
Game of Trust
Rats have a penchant for survival and proliferation, and agriculture provides easy pickings. Rat presence is near-ubiquitous at some level on agriculture operations of all types, and the creatures possess a stunning capacity for reproduction, with a single female potentially capable of setting off a chain of 15,000 offspring in a single year, dependent on food resources.
Females can copulate hours after giving birth, ovulate once every four days, and produce litters throughout their entire lives. (Life span in the wild is roughly 7-10 months.) Brown rats can start breeding at 8 weeks of age (roughly 12 weeks with limited food)—10-12 pups with plenty of food, and 4-5 pups with less food.
The rat math is alarming and highlights a vital service provided by Pybus. “The public thinks you can toss out poison on a farm and kill all the rats. No way. Some farmers pay big money for poisons and bait stations on the farm, but over the years, I’ve learned so much about the intelligence of rats—incredibly clever animals. If you put something new where they’ve been walking and running, they don’t touch the bait stations, because they have natural food sources inside the farm buildings. You can certainly kill some of the rats, but the big majority already have plenty of food to keep them busy.”
“The younger farmers think they have no rat problems because the bait stations are relatively untouched,” Pybus explains. “But when you go around at night with a thermal, you’ll see rats like you never imagined in the smallest of places. Rats certainly move in daytime as well, but not in numbers. The big mistake farmers make is by judging according to what they see during the day.”
On farms with high rat infestations, Pybus needs roughly 10 visits stretched over five to six weeks to decimate a population. After every shooting, he bags the kills for deposit at an incinerator. “For some of these farmers, they’ve no other reliable means to tackle their rat problem and it’s a privilege to help.”
Pybus operates on a 40-plus farm circuit—a mix of hog and dairy operations—along with two waste recycling centers. His popularity with farmers is massive—and growing. “I don’t get paid and this is just a hobby, but people need to realize these farmers put their trust in me on their properties to clean out their rats as fast as I can.”
“The game I’m in is a game of trust. If you earn a farmer’s trust then you’ll have a fantastic relationship, and farmers are my genuine friends, far beyond pest control. They are wonderful mates and I never have to buy beef, pork, lamb, or eggs.”
Nightmare
When Pybus first began rat hunting in 2015, he targeted infestations on the farms of several friends. Hoping to maximize hunting access to a nocturnal rodent, he built a night vision kit. “I took a 5” reversing camera, the same as you’d use on a vehicle. I had a tube running over my scope with a camera fitted inside. Basically, I wired the camera and screen together, and put a battery on it. That was my start.”
Two years later, Pybus performed a DIY overhaul with a better camera and bigger screen, and started filming videos and posting the content to Facebook. “One day, this random guy asked me if he could put one of my videos on YouTube. Sure; I sent him the clip and it got 3.5 million views. A few weeks later, I was driving with my daughter and the guy called again, asking for more footage. My daughter asked me the question that started me on YouTube: ‘Why are you sending him videos instead of making your own channel?’”
The Rat Buster was born. Twenty million views later, Pybus is a rat’s worst nightmare.
Call the Rat Buster
Pybus’ controlled chaos is filmed with an ATN X-Sight 4K Pro, drawing in millions of YouTube views. (By itself, a 13-minute shooting clip Pybus posted in December 2021 has 7.7 million clicks.)
His video uploads are big meat on the bone with little fat—heavy on shooting footage and lean on narration. “I don’t waste anyone’s time by needless introductions, and I get straight to the point. I had no clue people would go crazy and I never dreamed people would be fascinated by my videos. My subscribers sometimes jump by 1,000 in a single week.”
With 100,000-plus subscribers and counting, who are the watchers? “From the emails and comments, there are loads of farmers from around the world following my channel, but there are also people from all walks of life who want to see into a hunt. I suppose that in the way the hunt is filmed, the viewer feels like they are in the barn with me.”
Pybus sometimes tacks Rat Buster advertisement flyers at key locations around his farm circuit, always on the lookout to expand his network. Recently, placing a flyer while wearing a hunting jacket stamped with a Rat Buster logo, Pybus was approached by a fan: “This man walked up and said, ‘My God, you’re famous.’”
“The man told me he’d been pheasant hunting with a group of farmers the day before, and that one of the farmers was complaining about his rat problem and wasting money on pest control. Another farmer spoke up and told him, ‘Call the Rat Buster.’ It was surreal, but it was one of those moments where I realized the Rat Buster is far more well-known than I’ll ever be.”
Rat Buster videos once were strictly hunting footage, but after heavy demand from subscribers, Pybus stepped from behind the lens and now appears briefly on camera in some episodes. “The subscribers are fascinated, and they want to know more than my voice. They want to see who the Rat Buster is.”
After passing the 100,000-subscriber benchmark, Pybus is quick to credit his family. “I want to thank my wife, Sue, for putting up with me talking shooting and guns all the time, and letting me go shooting. I want to thank my daughter, Megan, and my granddaughter, LailaSue, for picking the channel’s name and for making the channel for me.”
Genuinely appreciative and humbled by his channel’s explosion, Pybus places emphasis on two pillars of his success: Colin Mann and a host of farmers.
“One, even in the middle of a hunt, my mind goes back to Colin. He was a lovely lad that got me into shooting full-time.”
“Two, I can’t operate my channel without a fantastic group of farmers,” Pybus adds. “I’m truly grateful for their help and I want to help them in return.”
To read more stories from Chris Bennett (cbennett@farmjournal.com — 662-592-1106), see:
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