I'm not suggesting you use poison or the rat bait boxes. They worked for me. I use the same rat bait box. I like it because I can check the bait as often as I want through the little window above the bait and it is child and dog proof. The bait that came with the bait box wasn't too appealing to the rats so upon a suggestion from a friend I tried a different bait and the rats loved it. I didn't find any dead rats around. I'm pretty sure they went into the tunnels they had dug around the coops. Like Mary, I had a coop that was infested. I didn't have any insulation in the wall cavity but the rats did chew holes in the wall and make nests in them. When I tore them and the ceiling out, dozens of rats poured out of all sizes. I put my rat bait boxes in our barn which is behind our coops because I had seen rats in the barn. I did some research and found that secondary poisoning is rare and the critters that would eat the dead rats would have to consume quite a few to be poisoned. As I said, I have not found any dead rats laying around. If there are tunnels around your coop, most likely they are rat tunnels. I'm sure that's where the rats went that ate the poison bait from the bait boxes here since I didn't find any dead rats laying around. This was the infested coop. Good luck...
That rascal that I noted in my earlier post in this thread sure climbed me. He was up at my neck in a flash.
