white belly wood rats!!

[panner123]

After you put the kids to bed at night, set out a bowl of oatmeal and cement mixed together. Remember to pick it up in the morning before you let the kids out. After about a week of this you will not see any more rats. They eat the mixture and die. The cement blocks their intestine. If there are as many as you say the smell might be hard to put up with for awhile. If any other critters eat the mixture they will die also.

 

[claud]

Are they really wood rats? Wood rats are kind of rare around here - habitats been taken over by the larger non-native Norway rat. Check out ratzapper.com - might help keep their numbers under control once you get their population down.

 

[jjthink]

Quote:
Yikes - did they actually chew through the hardware cloth? I haven't had that happen! And I'm talking BIG rats - a foot long without the tail.. Or did they just find a spot or two where the hardware cloth wasn't? Hopefully the latter! (since that's fixable).

My rat brats actually left the premises when they realized they couldn't get in anymore. Never saw them again, and I know there were a lot of them.

As far as making cement meals for the rats, or actually enjoying seeing dogs or chickens or whatever torture them alive - not in my play book. I don't wish pain and suffering on the rats - I just wanted them gone so I'm really glad the hardware cloth worked so well.
JJ

 

[GwenFarms]

It doesn't seem to me that a cat, or dog catching and killing something is torture. Boiling something alive is. A dog, or cat hunting is just seeing the food chain in motion. I'm sure if you have dogs, or cats, you've seen them catch prey atleast once. They tend to be much more efficient at killing their prey than we are. It's what they were born to do.

 

[jjthink]

If only it were so. Wild cats kill their prey rather quickly, because they are food focused. They are hungry. It's all business. Our well fed domestic cats more often than not play with and yes, torture, their prey before killing it. And then usually don't even eat it. I adore cats but in domesticating them we have created beings that generally torture their victims to death. I do not wish this on any being, except perhaps some truly evil humans!
JJ

 

[Wolf-Kim]

Quote:
Sounds like we need to make giant mutant domestic kitties for the punishment of the more horrid crimes.. The crime rate would drop like a rock..

LOL

 

[GwenFarms]

I still believe that letting a cat do the work is much more humane than most other options mentioned here, such as poisons, the feeding of cement, or boiling alive. Not to mention once a cat kills one, or two most others will scurry away. Live traps would never catch enough in a timely enough manner and what are you going to do with the ones you catch? Turn them out to be a nuisance to someone else? Are you just going to give them the coop and move? You just have to pick the best option.

I've never seen a building that rats couldn't get into. It would have to be giant rats that couldn't find a way into a building. We have a barn with cement floors and tin outer walls they still managed to get in there. They could squeeze themselves flat and go under doors. I saw them climb up the wood heaters flue and squeeze out around it. We had quite a huge problem with them until we put the cat in there. Within a week you didn't see rats. He didn't kill all of them, they just decided to leave once they realized a predator was among them.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own methods of dealing with these pests!

 

[Ang]

Just a word of caution that rats can be carriers of many diseases including rabies. Please be sure if you are going to use a cat or dog for extermination that they are vaccinated for rabies. Of course, the fact that rats carry diseases is a great reason for killing them.

 

[chicknmania]

There's lots of posts about rats on here and they are a problem. Lots of people feel like you do...they don't like killing em. And we don't want to use poison on the chance one would die where the chickens or our cats could get at it; then we'd have more problems. There is something called a ratzapper that we have thought about getting; cats are the best alternate solution. Someone told me once that they used to have ferrets in their barn to control the rats...i'm sure that would work, but I've never heard of anyone else doing that, and not sure how humane that would be for the ferrets.

 

[Cetawin]

Quote:
You are correct....the essential oil of peppemint and spearmint will keep them away...but only for as long as it is re-applied. The same as laying sulphur around the yard for snakes...great until it rains or fades.

I say spread some EO of peppermint to deter them but keep trapping!