Guinea or Barn Cat or get ride of 🐀???

[Lacey Gardner]

We have a rat/mouse problem... We have tried everything to get rid of them. Poison/traps etc. bring in chicken food at night.... I can’t grow any herbs or veggies because the rats are eating them!! (And yes it’s the rats eating them not the chickens. The chickens can’t get to them) Which would be more effective at helping get rid of them for good? A Barn cat or a Guinea?

 

[sourland]

I would say the barn cat as I have never heard of Guinea fowl as rat controls.

 

[Al Gerhart]

When you take the feed in at night the rats just switch to eating the chicken feed during the day. It is nearly impossible to trap or poison your way out of a rat infestation. Do a search on BYC for rats and chickens, there are hundreds of threads filled with advice and old wives tales on dealing with rats.

If you want the rats to leave you have to stop feeding the chicken feed to the rats. They cannot survive on herbs or veggies, not any sizeable population at least. And how do you stop feeding the rats? You either buy or build a treadle feeder. Do your research, don't trust most of the online reviews especially if they have a link and admit to getting a portion of the proceeds when you clink on their amazon link. There are a few reviewer out there that are independent and a lot of blog sites that have done reviews without succumbing to shilling for dollars.

Some cats might mouse but few will take on actual rats. And if you do a forum search you will find folks whose hobby is trying to outwit rodents but the majority of the "solutions" will stop working once you kill a few rats as rats are very intelligent. But, removing their access to the feed always works. Always, always, always.

A proper feeder doesn't have a wide treadle for the rats to gang up on. It has a spring loaded door and a countertweight. It is all galvanized steel, nothing else will stop a rat from chewing into the feeder. It should have a swing inward door, not one of the guillotine style doors, for the simple reason that you HAVE to block those feeders open to train the birds and once the rats know where the feed is they will gang up on the feeder and just push the lid open. If you do go on Amazon pay close attention to the negative reviews, 3 and below. There are always a few crazy people out there and those that refuse to follow much less read the directions, but the negative reviews ought to be single digits or you are reading a lot of reviews of people that bought a treadle feeder before they have rats. That is no real test, a real test is if you already have a rat infestation and need to solve it which is much, much, much harder to do.

Lastly, do a search for Howard E. and rats and you will find a wonderful post on dealing with rats, an exhaustively researched post, and another that has an old U.S. government treatise dealing with eliminating or controlling rodents. But the basics are sanitation, exclusion, then elimination in that specific order. A proper treadle feeder is sanitation as it prevents the rats from eating and if you do that you rarely ever need to spend a fortune trying to fence out rodents or poisoning them.

 

[Lacey Gardner]

When you take the feed in at night the rats just switch to eating the chicken feed during the day. It is nearly impossible to trap or poison your way out of a rat infestation. Do a search on BYC for rats and chickens, there are hundreds of threads filled with advice and old wives tales on dealing with rats.

If you want the rats to leave you have to stop feeding the chicken feed to the rats. They cannot survive on herbs or veggies, not any sizeable population at least. And how do you stop feeding the rats? You either buy or build a treadle feeder. Do your research, don't trust most of the online reviews especially if they have a link and admit to getting a portion of the proceeds when you clink on their amazon link. There are a few reviewer out there that are independent and a lot of blog sites that have done reviews without succumbing to shilling for dollars.

Some cats might mouse but few will take on actual rats. And if you do a forum search you will find folks whose hobby is trying to outwit rodents but the majority of the "solutions" will stop working once you kill a few rats as rats are very intelligent. But, removing their access to the feed always works. Always, always, always.

A proper feeder doesn't have a wide treadle for the rats to gang up on. It has a spring loaded door and a countertweight. It is all galvanized steel, nothing else will stop a rat from chewing into the feeder. It should have a swing inward door, not one of the guillotine style doors, for the simple reason that you HAVE to block those feeders open to train the birds and once the rats know where the feed is they will gang up on the feeder and just push the lid open. If you do go on Amazon pay close attention to the negative reviews, 3 and below. There are always a few crazy people out there and those that refuse to follow much less read the directions, but the negative reviews ought to be single digits or you are reading a lot of reviews of people that bought a treadle feeder before they have rats. That is no real test, a real test is if you already have a rat infestation and need to solve it which is much, much, much harder to do.

Lastly, do a search for Howard E. and rats and you will find a wonderful post on dealing with rats, an exhaustively researched post, and another that has an old U.S. government treatise dealing with eliminating or controlling rodents. But the basics are sanitation, exclusion, then elimination in that specific order. A proper treadle feeder is sanitation as it prevents the rats from eating and if you do that you rarely ever need to spend a fortune trying to fence out rodents or poisoning them.

Great advise!!! Thanks for all the info I will look into all of that.

 

[RojoMarz]

I have one of @Al Gerhart 's treadle feeders and love it. Our rodents are chipmunk not rats. But, they were getting in the "diy five gallon bucket with elbows" feeder during the day. We were already removing the feeder at night (due to bears)...The Ratproof Feeder has stopped the chipmunk buffet.

 

[cmom]

I used poison. I had a coop that was rat infested. When I started renovating it, taking out the ceiling and inner walls, dozens of rats poured out of all sizes. I had seen some rats in our barn which is behind the coops so I put some rat bait boxes out. The rat didn't seem to like the bait that came with the bait boxes so I bought different bait that the feed store down the road used. There were also some tunnels around the coops which I assumed the rats had made. The bait boxes I have, have a little window above the bait so I can check them daily. I didn't find any dead rats laying around so I also assume the rats went into their tunnels and died and the rat baits haven't been touched in awhile and I haven't seen any rats. This may not work for everyone but it worked for me.

 

[Lacey Gardner]

I used poison. I had a coop that was rat infested. When I started renovating it, taking out the ceiling and inner walls, dozens of rats poured out of all sizes. I had seen some rats in our barn which is behind the coops so I put some rat bait boxes out. The rat didn't seem to like the bait that came with the bait boxes so I bought different bait that the feed store down the road used. There were also some tunnels around the coops which I assumed the rats had made. The bait boxes I have, have a little window above the bait so I can check them daily. I didn't find any dead rats laying around so I also assume the rats went into their tunnels and died and the rat baits haven't been touched in awhile and I haven't seen any rats. This may not work for everyone but it worked for me.
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Thanks for the advise! I’ll try that one.

 

[cajuncluckerswla]

Rats are EXCEPTIONALLY smart. If one or two of them returned to the tunnels and died after eating the bait and there were others sharing the same tunnel network, the survivors will wise up to it and avoid it. Keep your eyes peeled for little gray or brown flashes!!

It also helps to put just a little bit of something like peanut butter inside the hole of the bait... just deep enough that they have to nibble on it to get to all of it out. That's the most surefire way to tell if they're hip to the poison or not. They can't resist sampling something new so constantly changing it up will make it more effective for longer.

 

[hayley3]

I used poison. I had a coop that was rat infested. When I started renovating it, taking out the ceiling and inner walls, dozens of rats poured out of all sizes. I had seen some rats in our barn which is behind the coops so I put some rat bait boxes out. The rat didn't seem to like the bait that came with the bait boxes so I bought different bait that the feed store down the road used. There were also some tunnels around the coops which I assumed the rats had made. The bait boxes I have, have a little window above the bait so I can check them daily. I didn't find any dead rats laying around so I also assume the rats went into their tunnels and died and the rat baits haven't been touched in awhile and I haven't seen any rats. This may not work for everyone but it worked for me.
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I had to resort to poison too. That also helped to keep the mice from wandering inside my house, so was a double benefit.

 

[LittleFalcon]

I would get several medium live traps and bait them with cooked chicken (rats like seasonings), bird seed, and some of the plants. If you have any you can add some hogfeed to that as well they really like it. I breed rats and sometimes one gets out and when rat is out for more than a day or two, they get this weird look in their eyes and turn savage. They bear no semblance to the loving rat they were just days before and act just like a wild rat. I have always caught the escapees using that solution though. Then they get fed off to a snake. A barn cat would be fine but barn cats more often go after mice and could get seriously injured if not killed by a rat.