MALIBU, Calif. — Wilmar Mejia can smell a rat. 

He’s been chasing rodents for decades, and sure enough he’s found droppings inside a Malibu mansion and a hole leading straight to the attic. 

As an exterminator for a major pest control company, Mejia once maintained poison-filled boxes at about 350 homes throughout this city. But that was the past. Mejia is a changed man who’s decided to – as they say – suck the poison out of his life. 

His new company, Tree of Life, manages rodents the old-fashioned way: by securing the perimeter and setting traps. If he happens to find a live mouse, he captures it and sets it free in the wilderness. 

The City Council in Malibu recently voted to ban anticoagulant rodenticides – or rat poison – in the city limits, despite a state law banning cities from doing so. Malibu leaders believe they can get approval though the Coastal Commission, the state agency in charge of maintaining California’s coastline. 

City leaders made the decision despite reluctance from their city attorney, who said the move could invite legal action from pest control companies. 

“If it ends up in some sort of lawsuit or whatever, let’s go there because this is so immoral,” said Councilman Mikke Pierson at the Dec. 9 meeting. 

The move isn’t about rats, but about the way poison makes its way up the food chain. This year, two dead mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains were found to have anti-coagulant rodenticide in their systems. 

“Oh no, look, we have open containers,” said environmentalist Kian Schulman as she rummaged through an open dumpster outside a shopping center off the Pacific Coast Highway. Schulman pointed to several poison boxes a pest control company had placed nearby. 

“The mouse goes into the hole here, eats the poison, and exits,” Schulman said, noting that mice eat the poison and leave, often to be eaten by predators in the wild. She and her husband fought for the rodenticide ban in Malibu for five years, and are ready to take their activism to other coastal communities. 

“There will be a lot of unhappy people, I can pretty much tell you,” said Mejia, the ex-exterminator who said a love for nature led him to stop using rat poison. 

Now he’s working to restore the balance of nature in the canyons and vistas he loves.