with rats, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. hardware cloth, wall to wall, ceiling and floor has kept rats from being an issue for me. I've never had to use poison to control them, that's a myth. I do still trap them around our gardens because they come for our food :~(). the best advice I've gotten is to put out ten or more traps at a time, even more is better. for the first round go head and bait them with peanut butter, bird seed or as suggested, something like nuts and nutella, something that will force them to fiddle with the trigger. once you stop getting any rats with bait, stop baiting the traps and think of them more like snares. if you can see on the video where they run, place the traps perpendicular to the trail that they frequent, forcing them to run over the trigger. rats are risk adverse, they tend to dart from hide to hide, they have your coop and runs mapped out in terms of safe trails in their head, they keep track of the trails by memory but also by leaving a trail of oils/dander, particularly on the corners of things that stick out along their trail. look for dark patches where hair/oil have been rubbed off, if you can find a few spots, you will know they frequent that area and it's a good place for a trap. they may feel so safe inside the coop that they just run willy nilly, and in that case, try and find where they enter the coop and look for any signs of trails leading up to it, particularly places where they are out in the open, that is where they will be the most reckless and likely to run across a trap. there are plenty of reasons to avoid poisons, but you have to get in their head a bit to kill them with snap traps and you have to be persistent, and yes, remove all source of food at night... and then, once the ground thaws, you have to seal up the coop so there is no more than an inch gap anywhere, leading to the outside, not in the roof, not under the eves or especially along the bottom of the walls, hardware cloth needs to extend down into the ground a good 24 inches. rats can climb up the side of a building, tight rope walk power lines, laundry lines, up siding or posts, they search and search, if there's a hole anywhere, they will find it if it means an open source of food. rats have up to 21 babies at a time, they can get pregnant within 6 weeks of being born. 2 rats can replicate into a thousand rats in six months. don't let a rat problem get out of control, it's a nightmare to deal with once they have a large colony.
