“You have to think like the rat,” my new friend Gregg told me. At the time, we were pushing Gregg’s homemade rat detector through a small hole in my basement ceiling. He had bought an endoscope camera online—the kind a doctor uses to hunt for polyps in one’s nether regions—and attached it to a bent wire coat hanger. The camera’s images would be displayed on his laptop.

Gregg became obsessed with rats when they took over his girlfriend Anne’s house…