You got the young ones which is good but the parents will have another litter of nine on the average in 22 days. Or less, she was likely pregnant with the next litter before you found her litter.
One to two days after a mother rat delivers her litter she is breeding again and there is a 21 day gestation period. Her babies will be ready to breed eight to twelve weeks after they are born.
Pouches.... like filled with smelly stuff? Doesn't work, will never work. Traps, ditto. You might get one or two younger rats, rarely the breeding age rats, they are just too smart for that. Poison, same thing unless the rats are starving and on the verge of death few rats will fall for poison other than a few young ones with less experience.
Everyone write this down. There are ONLY two ways to eliminate rats.
The first is to build a Fort Knox tight coop. This is the exclusion method.
The second method, the sanitation method, bulk feed in metal drums with tight lids (gotta do this with the first method too), clean up any pathways they use between the feed and their dens so natural predators get some of them when they begin to starve, and you have to buy a treadle feeder, preferably a rat proof feeder and no, most of them are not so watch the negative reviews very carefully. What makes a treadle feeder rat proof is an inward swinging door with an adjustable spring system that pre loads the door to prevent rats from just pushing the door open. It also needs a narrow and distant treadle to prevent the rats from swarming the feeder. Not that it can't happen with a commercial flock that has hundreds of adult rats but
that inward swinging door traps the rats and they smother if left overnight.
You do need mostly adult medium size birds, a few banties or silkies will learn to eat when they can and a soft close feature really helps in those cases. You do need a post or wall to fasten the feeder to so it doesn't tip over or shake too much feed down into the tray but a chunk of plywood can be staked to the ground and the feeder fastened to that plywood.
So, a great victory was had. You set the colony back at least three weeks, but a single female rat can produce 144 rats in one year. The compounding nature of a species that is ready to breed at 8 to 12 weeks means that a single pair of rats are capable of producing 15,000 offspring in a single year. They won't, mainly food supplies will quickly be stripped and they will have caused enough damage to car and house wiring that someone will try to limit their numbers. And predators will catch quite a few.
You can kill all you like, more will move right into the vacant territory. The only way to stop rats is to stop feeding them. Either through exclusion or through sanitation. Until you pick one method you will continue to pay for what is needed to stop them even though you don't have what is needed to stop them.
