DANNY Ledoux's business card is not unlike thousands of others distributed daily throughout Hong Kong. It gives a telephone number and an address, and bears a company logo in English and Chinese. There is nothing out of the ordinary - except the line, in capitals above his name, 'KILLING IS OUR BUSINESS'.
When on the job, Mr Ledoux looks like an identikit version of a professional assassin, wearing an all-black outfit of trousers with the bottoms stuffed into mid-calf lace-up boots, polo neck shirt and a rugged outdoor jacket with lots of capacious pockets; a paramilitary-style uniform that would look at home on the Los Angeles Police Department's SWAT team.
Detailed in his conversation, quietly spoken, and wearing a nondescript pair of trousers and a shirt, Chau Gar-wai is the very opposite of the bustling Mr Ledoux. Yet Mr Chau also kills for a living, or at least he advises on the most efficacious methods of extermination, although as a government civil servant he doesn't advertise the business of killing on his card.
Directly and indirectly, Mr Ledoux and Mr Chau have accounted for the deaths of thousands of one of the world's most intelligent, fastidious, gregarious and adaptable creatures - the rat. As managing director of Pesticide Services of North Point and the Health Department's chief pest control officer respectively, they are at the cutting edge of a battle to control the millions of rodents that swarm the streets, sewers, roofs, and nooks and crannies of Hong Kong.
Rats are not getting a good press at the moment, although as the most cursory glance at a history book will show, they have long been in need of a good PR consultant. In February, 88-year-old Cheung Tai died at Princess Margaret Hospital after she and two other women were attacked by rats in their Tsuen Wan old people's home. Bacterial meningitis was one suspected cause of her death.
Suddenly rats - call them sewer rats, wharf rats, common rats, rattus norvegicus, rattus rattus or bandicots - were again big news. The vice-chairman of the Public Health Committee estimated there was a rat for every one of Hong Kong's six million residents, although Mr Ledoux scoffs at this figure, believing it to be possibly three times higher.
