Rats in coop..HELP!

[JeninMN]

has anyone had rats in their coop????

The neighbor called us a few weeks ago with news from the neighbors to the west of us that harvested their wheat crop...they saw rats running in the field and wanted us to be aware of it as they would be looking for someplace to relocate too....we haven't seen them but we are seeing their poop in the nest boxes....BIG poops....so in otherwords we've got some large rats that are somehow getting in. I think I found a hole where they have rounded the hole out big enough to slide in (the bottome half of our shop is wood and they chiseled away at it with their teeth)

I dont see where they have done anything to any of them but I 'm worried if they will try to attack the chickens?

How can we get rid of them when they aren't out when we are? We can't poison as our dogs are right there too...We are baiting some traps tonight but is there anything else we can do?

Our "chicks" are 23 weeks old...

 

[SundownWaterfowl]

Rats are nasty. If you have young chicks they will kill them, plus the eat alot of the food. Put traps out every night until you go a week without catching anything.

 

[laughingllama75]

they WILL eat eggs, chickens/pigeons etc. so start trapping/poisoning now. When you actually see them, there is 7 for every one you see (or so I've read). I had a bad problem with them, took me darn near 2 years and the loss of 30+ birds to get rid of them. Good luck.

 

[Chicken Boo]

Remove anything that a rat would find a good place to live. If you have boxes, cans, other containers, trash, wood piles, or anything else they can make a home in, move it away from the coop and your house. If they have very little cover to move around or places to make nests, they will move on.

 

[JeninMN]

We trapped a big one overnight...we have our dog food in a metal trash bin that they cannot get into..we are now going to get one of those for the chicken feed....this is so frustrating...we dont even have mice in our house but now we have rats out by our chickens!!!
Can they hurt a 23 week old chicken? We see NO evidence of them being on the floor of the coop..just in the nesting boxes...which is NOT good either I know....

 

[SundownWaterfowl]

Quote:
I dont think that they would harm a 23 week old chicken, but rats can carry lice, mites, and nasty diseases. I would get a apple crate, and put a 2 inch hole in it, set it upside down, and put poison under the box, that way your dogs, and chickens cant get to the poision, and your rats are dying. That is what I did.

 

[DLS]

If a rat eats poison & a dog or chicken eats the rat will the dog die? I figgure that a chicken will swallow a mouse for shure

 

[SundownWaterfowl]

They could get secondary poisioning but I doubt that a chicken would eat a rat. I had 3 poisioned rats dead in the chicken run, and nobody tried to eat them. There are some safer posions to use, but now I dont remember the names.