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By Julia Rothman and Shaina Feinberg
April 7, 2022Updated 5:11 p.m. ET
ImageFor more than a decade, Scott Palatnik, a 59-year-old licensed exterminator, and his trusty dog have pursued bedbugs in New Yorkers’ bedrooms, office chairs and suitcases.“I was a professional chef from 1984 to 2010. I got laid off due to the market crash. Three months after I’m laid off, my landlord calls me up and says, ‘There’s bedbugs in the building.’ Here I am unemployed and I realize that everybody in New York City has bedbugs, or thinks they do.”“They’re using dogs to sniff them out. For $10,000 I can buy a fully trained bedbug detection dog and be in business. So I do that. And I’m off to the races.”“My dog is Hunter. He’s trained to sniff out live bedbugs and bedbug eggs. He can sniff out as little as one single bedbug. When he smells one, he sits.”“For Hunter, it’s all a game. Bedbugs have a very distinct odor. Humans can smell 10 things at a time and after we smell 10 things we say, ‘The room stinks.’ A dog walks into a room and smells 1,000 things at a time. And he can distinguish between the smells. If the bedbug odor is present, it doesn’t take the dog long to find it.”“Believe it or not, 80 percent of the inspections I do, there’s no bedbugs.”“People find carpet beetles and think they’re bedbugs. People get rashes from new laundry detergent; a hair on our arm moves and we think something’s crawling on us because we’re neurotic New Yorkers. Ninety percent of the time, I am convinced it’s mosquitos.”“It’s a pandemic-proof business, it’s recession-proof. The bedbugs have not gone anywhere. There’s no cure for it. ”“As soon as the weather starts to get warm, people put on shorts and move around outside — that’s it. Busy right up until Christmas. People call me up and say, ‘If you get here today, I’ll be your best friend.’ I tell them, ‘Why don’t you go over to your bed and pull back the sheets and tell me what you see.’ Everywhere they crawl they leave little black spots. They’re brown and they’re the size of an apple seed.”“If I can think like a bedbug, then I know where I would hide.”“I love helping people. That’s what it comes down to. I’m an exterminator and a bedbug eliminator. I’m a consultant. I’m a psychiatrist (I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m just being facetious). Some of the people who call me are freaking out. I can talk the most neurotic New Yorker off the ledge. I love that they need help and I’m going to help them. Like the hero, riding in on a horse with a cape. It’s a good feeling.”
