Rats! If they eat poison and the hens eat them..

[kimntep]

Found rat droppings on top of the babies' hutch and the ladies' nesting boxes. Maybe my egg eater is actually a rat? We found the hole they dug and placed an enclosed baited trap at the entrance. Question is..if they eat the bait, come out and die IN the coop and the girls peck on them, will it kill my girls??

 

[Judy]

What kind of rat poison are you using? I don't think you can ever say eating the poisoned rat is harmless to the chicken or whatever animal eats it -- but the literature says the chance is greatly reduced with some of the new rat poisons. I have safely used Just One Bite; the poison is bromadiolone. If I buy more it will be Motomco Hawk poison.

https://www.backyardchickens.com/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=606272#p606272

http://www.motomco.com/h_rodentbaits.htm

 

[DickGJ]

Hmmm...how about one of those sticky traps placed inside an appropriately sized tube of PVC piping? That way there's no poison, and by placing the trap inside the PVC pipe...you won't find a chicken stuck to it!

 

[kimntep]

ddawn, it sounds like the same stuff. It comes in block form and it makes them thirsty, so they leave the area to find water and as soon as they drink it activates the poison and they die..supposedly away from the area that attracted them in the first place. My fear is that they'll drink the girls' water as it's the closest source and die before they can get back out. Hubs says it won't be a problem, but it wouldn't be the first time he was wrong!

 

[NottinghamChicks]

An American Bald Eagle near my mom's house in FL fed its babies a poisioned squirrel and it killed them. It was on the news so I assume they were following the babies closely and made the determination before they put it on the news. So I would say it is unsafe.

 

[kimntep]

Quote:
Great idea. I'm very new to this and I don't want to get discouraged so easily..rats, snakes, flies, prolapse, cannibalism, egg-eaters..I've already had it all! But I do love my girls and want to take care of them so that they live long, happy, healthy lives!

What do you do..Slide the pvc back and forth under the coop to dump and reload? How big a pipe? The only glue traps I've seen are quite large..can you cut them down or do they sell little ones??

 

[Mek]

maybe try a gravity trap if you have the space and a large bin and ruler.

Put ruler over bin and carefully balance something nice like chocolate/chocolate wrapper.

The mouse or rat will try to get at the bait and then fall in the container.

Alternatively you can use a humane rat trap which will capture the rat alive. ...I have used the mouse sized one when they were going for my cockatiels feed

 

[quinkerton]

I would try a non-poisonous method. We used something a few years ago, I can't remember what it was but the rats left dropping in the girls yard and a few of them ate the droppings and died. Just be careful with what you use. Learn from our mistakes.

 

[Judy]

Nothing wrong with traps if they work -- but sometimes the rats get smart and people find nothing but poison works. I'm just saying there are poisons and then there are poisons. I was in a store with an extensive pest control section the other day, and they did not have one type of mouse/rat poison that I would use where other animals could eat the dead rat. Again, not that the new ones are 100% safe -- but if you read the studies, hopefully the chickens would not get enough fro a couple of dead rats to kill them.

I wonder what kind of rat poison that Eagle got into. They used to use warfarin, which could definitely kill the animal that ate the rat. I've lost cats to that stuff, put out by a neighbor who liked my cats even less than he liked rats, I believe.

 

[Katydid2011]

Quote:
Rat holes cropped up around our new pullet coop and run last month, so we fenced off a small area and placed a rat trap inside - the kind with a green block of poison inside of a plastic run-in cube. Like you, I thought the rat(s) would eat the poison, then crawl back into a burrow to die. Once the rat activity ceased, I figured we would simply fill in the holes: problem solved. I was wrong.

Yesterday, I found a huge, dead rat just inches away from our coop door! I had actually opened the door to let the pullets out in the half-light of early morning, before I actually noticed the rat! The pullets immediately saw it and ran over to investigate. I grabbed a manure fork and scooped up the rat, then dropped it in the burn barrel and cremated it. I figured I couldn't bury it without risk of something, maybe even one of our dogs, digging it up.

I have no idea why the rat died out in the open like that. I'm a country girl and my experience is that animals crawl away to die (even with poison, death is not immediate, in my experience). Anyway, I'm no longer taking it for granted that a poisoned rat or mouse will die in it's burrow or hidden away somewhere. I don't want them around my pullets and hens but I'm not sure how to control them, as using poison puts the chickens at risk. We'll likely resort to the sticky traps, albeit they're terribly inhumane.