I Hate Rats!

[Impress]

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Rats can chew through concrete. They can even chew through lead pipes.

Wow, what's left? Titanium?

That might keep them out.

Rats are amazing creatures, your best bet is to deal with them with traps. I would love to see a titanium chicken coop!

 

[Bigcreekpeafowl]

Wow, what horrible creatures rats are! Sounds like they are trying to take over.
We closed the brooder house that the silkies were in for several years after that incident with the rats. Poison or exterminators is the only thing left I can think of that would actually work. With poison one always worries about something else getting a hold of it. And exterminators are so expensive. I have heard of using carbon monoxide down the holes, but don't know much about that.

 

[Enchanted Sunrise Farms]

Well, actually, our feed store had metal chicken coops this past year. Metal everything, including roosts. i thought to myself those must be very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer.

 

[Chicken_Guy]

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Wow reading the rest of these posts makes me afraid of rats! If it helps, the people I know who have a GrandpasFeeder haven't experienced any issues with chicken decapitation and even small chickens/bantams (and even ducks and geese) all use the feeder without risk. Since you mentioned it, I also checked out the grandpa website out of curiosity and saw that they do mention some of those things in their 'Grandpa's Tips' section.

 

[AngryHummingbird]

Rats are terrible to deal with, especially if they've had the time to make themselves at home.

It's a strange suggestion, but have you thought about getting some guinea fowl? They're pretty good at evicting small to medium sized nuisances. Mostly because they're medium sized nuisances themselves. (Kidding... Mostly...) They're loud and obnoxious and can eat quite a bit, but IMO worth it for the added protection. I've found all of one rat in the coop. It was a huge rat and thankfully also a very very dead rat. The guineas were going to eat the rest of it, but we have poison down so I confiscated it. They were quite upset.

Good luck getting rid of the rats!

 

[Enchanted Sunrise Farms]

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We actually had some guineas for a while. My friend gave me hatching eggs. They are so darn cute as kids, but not super friendly. You can't cuddle them like chickens. Anyhow, as they grew, they started getting louder. Sounded like a really obnoxious squeaky door, and they would go on forever. i am normally very tolerant of our animal noises (unlike my husband) but even i couldn't stand it.

 

[Enchanted Sunrise Farms]

Okay, night before last i saw something small and then something larger scurrying around the pens. i put a sticky trap and two large snap traps inside that back aviary. Then set up our rat zapper right where i saw them running. In the morning, we had caught a mouse in the rat zapper. So again last night, i set the zapper again. This morning it had been set off, but no one was in there.

When i walked back to look inside the aviary, i saw something stuck on the sticky trap. But when it saw me, it panicked and jerked, and fell into one of the snap traps. Euwwwwwwww!

i made my husband come out and shoot it to put it out of it's misery, just in case the snap trap didn't work fast enough. It was a baby rat.

So now that's 8 baby rats and a mouse. Still haven't caught mom yet. She's probably out looking for a new husband.