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Through Julia Rothmann and Shaina Feinberg
Released April 7, 2022Updated May 23, 2022
pictureFor more than a decade, Scott Palatnik, a 59-year-old registered exterminator, and his trusty dog have hunted bed bugs in New Yorkers’ bedrooms, office chairs, and suitcases.“I was a professional chef from 1984 to 2010. Because of the stock market crash, I was fired. Three months after I was laid off, my landlord calls me and says, ‘There are bugs in the building.’ Here I am unemployed and I realize that everyone in New York City has or thinks they have bed bugs.”“They use dogs to track them down. For $10,000 I can buy a fully trained bed bug sniffer dog and be in business. So I do that. And I go to the races.”“My dog is Hunter. He is trained to track down live bugs and bug eggs. He can sniff out as little as a single bed bug. When he smells you, he sits down.”“For Hunter, it’s all a game. Bugs have a very distinctive smell. Humans can smell 10 things at once, and after smelling 10 things we say, “The room stinks.” A dog walks into a room and smells 1,000 things at once. And he can distinguish the smells. If the bug smell is there, it doesn’t take the dog long to find it.”“Believe it or not, 80 percent of the inspections I do don’t find bed bugs.”“People find carpet beetles and mistake them for bed bugs. people get rashes from new detergent; a hair on our arm moves and we think something is crawling on us because we’re neurotic New Yorkers. I’m ninety percent convinced it’s mosquitoes.”“It’s a pandemic-proof business, it’s recession-proof. The bugs didn’t go anywhere. There’s no cure for it. ”“As soon as it gets warmer, people put on shorts and move around outside – that’s it. Busy until Christmas. People call me and say, ‘If you come here today, I’ll be your best friend.’ I tell them, ‘Why don’t you go to your bed and pull back the sheets and tell me what you see?’ Wherever they crawl, they leave little black spots. They are brown and the size of an apple seed.”“If I can think like a bug, then I know where I would hide.”“I love helping people. That’s what matters. I’m an exterminator and bed bug eliminator. i am a consultant I’m a psychiatrist (I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m just joking). Some of the people who call me freak out. I can talk the most neurotic New Yorker off the edge. I think it’s great that they need help and I will help them. Like the hero riding in on a cloaked horse. It is a good feeling.”
