Mortified.

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Thanks everyone for your help! I am now so afraid of the poison as I just have so many animals that I am really scared to take the chance. I think I am going to get a couple of those big old dead kill traps and set ip up near the outside hole that goes under the coop in the pen when everyone is away for the night. I don't know, I think as long as I have the chickens I will have them, their pellets are all over the place and I know that is what it is. But I am going to try trapping.
 
Fill the hole with water and have a shovel ready. Works for moles and gophers to. Baseball bats can be handy, but I know people that get carried away when they use them....

Bubba
 
oh that sounds terrible! at least your girls arent DIGGING the holes. today i found mine digging right along the fence, it was 5 inches deep, for dust bathing. i covered it up though. i would go with bubbas idea.
 
Plant peppermint all along the sides of the barn. Rats do NOT like peppermint smell. If you can get peppermint oil or essence you can put that in the barn. I read over at Dave's Garden (forum of choice those days - but hey they let to chickens and here) where a lady had rats in her greenhouse who used the oil method - but she forgot to leave a way for them to get out - apparently they did some damage in their attempts to escape. I saw a rat or a very large mouse in my house few monthes back in the laundry room did a load of wash with dr. Bronnners peppermint soap - left the back door open - have not seen any evidence since - still have traps out though.....HTH
 
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm,,, I am sure I could find some peppermint oil and that stuff would probably stick a long time. No rats in my barn, they are around one chicken coop that has a dirt floor.

What is Dr.Bronners Peppermint Soap????? Is it laundry detergent?
 
Quote:
Can you use that peppermint soap to put around the coop or garage or whereever there is rat signs? Or should one get the actual OIL? THanks!
 
I got rats under my outbuilding where my outside dogs go in at night. The rats were attracted by the dog food and were taking over. I hated to have to kill them, but couldn't have so many. I have cats out there, but literally walked in there one evening to find 2 rats eating out of the cat bowl, and the cats sitting over to the side looking at the rats like 'take all you want, don't mind us...'. Those rats were too much for my cats to want to mess with! Mice don't bother me too much, but the rats can get pretty big on kennel rations... come to think of it, once the rats showed up, I didn't ever see mice. Once the rats were gone, the mice came back.

Anyway, at first I used the old-timey snap traps - sometimes would catch 2 at a time in one trap. Use peanut butter. If you only have a SMALL popluation (ie, just found them) then traps may work OK for you if you can find a way to keep the other animals out of them.

I was catching 5-10 rats a week for over a year before I finally gave up and decided to use poison. I was able to put the poison in the building where the dogs couldn't get to it. I put new 'bait' out every day until it got to the point where there was no more bait eaten. Sure enough about 2 days later, it started to smell so bad in the building I couldn't hardly stand to go out to take care of the dogs. They had all crawled up under the building, no doubt, in their holes to die. For over 2 years I haven't had any signs of rats. AND, my dog food bill dropped at least 1/3. They were easily eating the amount of food of a large dog every day.

I actually saw a new tunnel just this week out there - time to bring out the poison again. I'm going to shove the bait block way under there and put a cinder block over the opening so the dogs can't get to it and hope I can nip them in the bud. I don't like to use the poison, but rather poison a couple of rats now than 100s later... At least I know my dogs are so old they won't be able to do much to dig out the poison.

Good luck with the rats - they will pretty much chew through anything and breed VERY quickly. Try to nip it now if you can!

Susan
 
I work in a pharmacy and people come in all the time asking for peppermint oil for mice/rats so I would definitely have some on hand to use. Maybe put it in a spray bottle to spritz around the areas you are having trouble with.

I would try to drown them out of the holes as suggested so you can hopefully kill them off. If you don't want to do that you could always douse the dryer sheets with peppermint and shove them down the holes.

If I decided to use poison (I would be afraid one of my animals would eat the poisoned rat..) I would put small guage wire mesh over the holes then place a big cinder block on top of that. Although I guess they could try to tunnel out someplace else.

Small live traps that are too small for chickens to get into would probably be safe so you could kill the rats.

Good luck

Julie
 

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