RATS!! too smart to get caught, help!

[Mahonri]

I buy "Just One Bite" slather it in Peanut Butter and put it in bait tubes. They eat it, they die.

 

[Katy]

Quote:
My husky mix is a much better ratter than my rat terrier.

 

[Countrywife]

I have the same trouble going on. Right now, the new cope seems to be ok, as hubby built it up off the ground. I do want to throw out this though- I used to poison the rats, and then realized when they were dying my dogs were finding the carcassas. I stopped poisoning them in fear my dogs would eat one, and then be poisoned themselves. Please be careful with the poison.

 

[MonkeyZero]

LOL

My chihuahuas chased a few rats before
I killed one of the 3 they have chased
ATM
My neighbor and I see a larger black mose with a white spot on its head running about in both of our yards, and have yet to have caught it...

 

[Beekissed]

Quote:
I do this but without the peanut butter.....OneBite works every time! I use mine in the locked shed next to the coop, where the rats actually live. It's a tastey treat that they have to nibble off the bar, hence getting a nice dose of warfarin.

Sounds like you have a pretty large infestation! I bet you are losing large amounts of feed to these critters.....

 

[Kyah]

If you see one rat in the daytime, there are at least 100 more. It's insane how quickly they reproduce.

We had a war with rats 9 years ago when they tore an old barn down up the road. They migrated here, to my barn. They destroyed the garden, chewed holes all through the barn, pawed the insulation out. They were so bad, that they had trails going from the barn to the garden.

I called an exterminator, and he told me that for $200, he would "saturate" my property with poison and he guaranteed his work. But at the time, I had a lot of animals and little kids around, not to mention the brook behind the house, so I had to come up with another way.

I bought 6 of the big black snap traps at Walmart, and they worked pretty good for the young rats, but the older rats were "trap wise" and wouldn't go near. So I took my Dad's old 1 1/2 leghold traps and made blind sets at the entrances of their holes in the barn. I would set the trap at the "front door" hole was and cover it with insulation, so the rat couldn't see it. And because there was no bait, he/she was not wary of anything.

I also set the traps in the paths they made out to the garden. I caught around 25 rats the first night. I mentioned the problem to an old farmer friend of mine, and he said to use plaster of paris and white cake mix (mixed together in equal proportions). I did that too, but I used chocolate mix, because rats love chcocolate, lol. I put the mix in glass jars laid on their sides where no other animals could get at it. The rats ate it all up for about 5 days, then I noticed a drastic drop in how many rats I was catching.

It was an awful ordeal, but lesson learned for me. I keep a couple traps set all the time now just in case one comes along and gets any bright ideas about setting up house keeping in barn again, lol.

Kyah

 

[lilcrow]

Quote:
What a nightmare!

I can't imagine what that must have been like for you, not just the work involved because that is a tremendous amount of work, but no matter how much you want to get rid of something and hate having it around, even fear having it around, it's still VERY difficult handling that magnitude of dead bodies. It kind of takes a little toll on you someplace no matter how much you tell yourself you have to do it. I'm so sorry you had to go through that, but it sounds like you really used your head. I'm VERY impressed.

 

[jmc]

Make a recipe for 'rat rocks' as mentioned above 2ce.

1 part peanut butter, one part veg. oil, one part plaster of paris.

rat eats in and (theoretically), water in his system mixes with the plaster of paris and --WHOOBOY, THE CONSTIPATION!

end of rat.

start with benign decoys. I am using flour in place of the p of p right now, and he is falling for it. Then after a few more benign balls taken, I'll put some out with the p of p and (theoretically) end of our little friend Rattoné!

 

[Mac in Wisco]

The last time I did battle with rats was about twenty years ago. The neighbors had a very large deck around an above ground pool and several woodpiles in their backyard where Norway rats were burrowing in and we were starting to see them in our garage. I used #2 steel leg hold traps that we used for muskrat. I'd bait them with peanut butter or balls of white bread and set them on a hair trigger. I caught 2 or 3 a day for several weeks.

 

[technodoll]

You all have such amazing ideas and it seems many methods work, so that's awesome!

I have yet to see a dead rat (body) so it's frustrating... something's eating the poisoned bait and I think it's mice, hey any dead rodent is a good rodent but it's the rats that I really want to get as they are digging bloody holes and highways into the coops, crapping everywhere, it's disgusting!

I really want to tear the whole coop down, it's a rotten eyesore and infested with critters - gaaaah I need a bank loan or something

Will try a few of your methods and hope it works...

Does the cold north-eastern kill vermin at all, do they hibernate or just continue being a pest all winter long?