Rats/mice advice

I’ve got some. I bought a pile of traps/poison from B&Q (it felt to me like an essential trip). Any real world experience on what is best way of dealing with them? So far I’ve just liberally distributed the traps and poison in lofts/under floors, taking care to make sure it’s not accessible to my dogs but there’s not a lot of targeted logic to it. I’ve not done a deep dive into the psychology of my prey.

Might just be dumb luck but I got one. Seems big for a mouse.

Probably won’t reuse the reusable shopping bag.

The fresh meat counter at your supermarket has gone downhill.

Still, how about a nice rat skewer for tea?

PS definitely not a mouse.

That’s definitely a rat. Used to be able to get the rat man in FOC (but not mice) through the local authority. With cuts in funding not sure that they provide this service any more but worth checking with your LA.

Rats and mice tend to run along the edges of walls and rafters rather than across open spaces. If there are any obvious routes they use or holes they pass through put poison nearby rather than traps as a trap only catches one while poison might get many. Leave traps and poison in place after you think you have cleared the present infestation in case their friends decide to move in later

You’ll want ketchup with that

Angua: Why does ketchup cost almost as much as the rat?
Carrot: Have you ever tried rat without ketchup?

When I was doing my best to decimate the mouse population in my house I found the best way was to look for where there dropping were, gross I know, and set the traps there. I seem to remember reading that mice follow “trails” and will generally keep the walls and other hard surfaces so I’d use that sort of method to lay the traps. I didn’t use poison but I did make sure that the traps were checked regularly and I did have to dispose of some where the trap did quite do it’s job. There were the “olds fashioned” traps not the “humane” traps. That sort of thing gets easier after a while. Rats I’m not so sure about, I think they need much bigger traps to deal with them.

People’s ability to quote Pratchett on here never ceases to amaze me

Don’t use poison if they are in your house.

Nothing stinks more than a decomposing rat trapped in a cavity wall or under the floor.

Rats are incontinent. They piss constantly, everywhere they go.

Rat urine will flouresce under UV light, the fresher it is the more brightly and bluey-white it’ll be. It decays with age and turns more yellowy. They also shed oily hairs which also show up under UV.

If you think you suspect where they’ve been operating , get a UV light and wait till it’s dark and you’ll be able to check.

I can thoroughly recommend the Good Nature A24, CO2-powered rodent killing machine. We bought one last year to try and eliminate scratching from the underfloor void. Thinking was that they might try sheltering there, but have to find food elsewhere and outside.

Since we got it in May last year, it has killed 43 assorted rodents and no more scrtichy scratch. Not cheap, but if you use it properly, keep it topped up with rat nip (chocolate-flavoured paste that lures them in) it kills them well dead. No poison, no messy snap-trap corpses, just dead rodents with their heads stoved in instantly.

This is the original Kiwi company page, but they’re available from UK retailers, not cheap, but worth it ime:

A24 Rat & Stoat Trap Kit

BTW, I would avoid poison unless you know what you are doing – you don’t want the smell of a decomposing rat in your house – it isn’t nice and it takes lots of shifting.

People’s ability to Google half remembered Pratchett quotes on here never started to amaze me

Used poison and traps to get rid of the ones in the house.

The ultrasonic repeller seems to have kept them away .

I only turn it on at end of summer when they are trying to find a warm place and some food.

As gonefishin says, have a look for any trails. Grim work but they’re creatures of habit and will often follow existing rat paths through a house.

We lifted our loft insulation and found that they’d been living up there for years whilst the previous owners did nothing about it.

Also check your sewer inspection cover, they often come up through the sewers and a cap had come off ours (the plug above where the waste flows) a new plug fitted by the rat man has hopefully stopped their entry point to the house now. That was the first thing he looked at when visiting, so must be a common area.

Peanut butter on the traps too, they love that stuff and we got 4 in a few hours with that.

here’s not a lot of targeted logic to it. I’ve not done a deep dive into the psychology of my prey.

It’s definitely worth doing some research. There’s some good stuff on various A24 sites and elsewhere. As I understand it, rats are neophobic, so they avoid new stuff until they’re used to it being there. They won’t like any human scent on traps either, so wear gloves if/when installing/setting them. They tend to move along walls and feed more readily where they feel secure, so stuff out in the open isn’t going to be much good. They’re also slightly fussy about what they eat and communicate what’s safe by trying a little and then using whisker contact to communicate that to their mates. Which all sounds mad. It’s oddly fascinating though.

The other thing, if you have them inside, is working out how they’re getting in and blocking off access points which can be really small otherwise they’ll just keep on coming into your house. Crawl spaces are difficult because they can just dig under the foundations and come up into the space. As far as I can tell, the only thing you cam do about that is have a concrete rat slab laid to seal it off.

Good luck!

Earlier in the year I had mice in the garage. Tried humane traps and they didn’t work so went straight in with the classic Tom & Jerry style traps with a bit of cheese on them and got 4 or 5 mice in the space of a few days and not had any back since (left the traps set in the places I’d caught others – up in the roofspace of the garage etc.

Around the exact same time though a mate had rats in his attic. Think he tried traps etc but in the end got pest control in to deal with them and they were dealt with in days, identified where they were getting into the house and follow up confirmed there were no others.

Good advice on the traps instead of poison, our pest control guy used poison and we had at least 3 incidents of trapped rotting rats under the floor followed by huge fly swarms. Also with poison you don’t know how many you have killed necessarily, or the size/age of the catch. The poison you get retail is also half the strength of pro stuff and depending on ingredients might not even work effectively.

Putting traps on their routes is key too, tricky if you don’t know where they go. As you have caught one you can work wherever that was as a central point though.

You really should try and find access points and close them off, otherwise you kill off this group and when weather worsens another load come in.

Rats are neophobic, scared of new things, so traps may not always get them straight away. They hate the smell of new things. They apparently like to smell food on the breath of others before they will trust it, so some small splodges of peanut butter near to traps can help up the catch quickly.

They travel a decent way for food and might live in a group of 5-8. Reproduction is rapid and you need to stamp them out quickly.

I would be surprised if they go near the dogs though, natural predator and all that (unless you have Pugs).

I’m starting to regret putting poison up in my loft now – I thought it might be an issue if the rat crawled off and died somewhere but I convinced myself it/they would die in an easy-to-reach place :p I think it’s a rat anyway, only started a couple of weeks ago, really loud scratching from the loft, sounded like something cat-size trying to dig it’s way through. Couldn’t see any obvious signs when I checked the next day (armed with a torch, hammer and carrier bag…) but it would be trivial to get in through the eaves if they can climb walls/drain pipes etc.

Only had the poison up there a few days now, guess will check if anything’s been nibbled today.

That Good Nature zapper thing looks interesting, I take it it would be fine in a loft or are they just meant for outdoors?

The mouse man from the council told us that the poison they use makes the mice thirsty so they go outside looking for water before they die – in theory meaning they don’t die in the house

Use chocolate in the mouse trap rather than cheese.

Mice love a bit of chocolate!

That Good Nature zapper thing looks interesting, I take it it would be fine in a loft or are they just meant for outdoors?

You can put them anywhere, indoors or out. They also comes with some feeding detector tabs that you put in likely cases to see if they’re feeding there. When you find one, you just site the trap there, pre-feed it and wait… They do a stand for indoor use as well, so you can move the trap around easily. Ours is bolted to a pallet outside then hidden behind a plank so they feel safe and sheltered. I like that there’s no poison, no danger to pets and no mess to clean up.

They have a great back story too. Designed in NZ to stop predators wiping out indigenous bird populations. Basically they’re set and forget, so you can leave them there unattended for several weeks and they just keep working.

Sticky boards are worth considering. Not nice things but they seem to work.

Use chocolate in the mouse trap rather than cheese.

Mice love a bit of chocolate!

Tom and Jerry lied to us for years

Peanut butter with a bit of chocolate is the best

We had a similar issue a couple of years ago.
Our local authority has a pest control section (Leeds fwiw) and for less than £100 they sent a man round.
He established where they were getting in, set poison in the relevant areas of the loft and came back 3 or 4 times until he was happy that we no longer had any rats living in the house – as said above, the poison makes them thirsty and they leave the house looking for water.
Once clear, I blocked up their entry (they’d chewed through a plastic airbrick and were using the cavity and loft as their playground!).
I’ve still got poison in the corner of the loft in case any more get in but as yet it hasn’t been disturbed.
Traps are fine if you’ve only got a couple of rats, our rat man said we had ‘many generations’ living in our loft.
I’d get a man in and save the stress.

What you need to do is bury an oil drum in the ground with a hinged lid. Wire a coconut to the lid to act as bait.

Release any survivors into the trees to roam the rest of your island. They’ll do the rest.

From what I have read and picked up, what the poison does depends very much on what they use.

Brodifacoum is the key poison for rats and I have read nothing to suggest it makes them thirsty, and indeed when it killed 3 rats in my house they didn’t go outside but under the floor and died.

A few bits online suggest Diphacinone may cause thirst and urination in rodents (and humans!) but that isn’t what you want to be using for rats by any means (due to being accumulative, time take to kill and I believe potential for resistance).

One other point is if rats have access to other food supplies they might totally ignore poison or bait on traps. That can be a really tough one to solve but is critical.

We have a chippy, a chinese, a pub, someone keeping chickens and someone keeping ducks all within a stone throw of my house.

Unsurprisingly there are a few rats round our way and we’ve had a few incidents…

The dog found a dead rat under our hedge, that was fun to get off her…

We heard scratching in our wall, I investigated and found the hole.  Left it a while until the scratching had stopped and filled it in.  Then the smell started… our study ponged for a good while.  The Rentokill odour remover pouches worked quite well. It’s just about gone now but it’s not made he working during lockdown any easier.

A few weeks back i was at  the cashpoint and heard rustling coming from the drain behind me, look down and there is a bit rat having a fight with a sweet wrapper.

And finally the other morning i let the dog out into the garden and she ran over to a brown shape on the lawn, didn’t have my glasses on so couldn’t really see what it was until it hissed and squeeked at her and I saw the tail.  It then wobbled off.  It was clearly on the way out as there is no way a rat just sits on your lawn in broad daylight.  I suspect someone is poisoning them rather than trapping them and dealing with them properly which is a dick move.

Designed in NZ to stop predators wiping out indigenous bird populations. Basically they’re set and forget, so you can leave them there unattended for several weeks and they just keep working.

Don’t the rats get suspicious if they have to climb over several of their dead buddies in order to stick their head in the tube?

I suspect someone is poisoning them rather than trapping them and dealing with them properly which is a dick move.

Depending on where they are, and where they are getting to, poison is sometimes the only way.

Thanks for the advice. I’ve started doing a bit more reading and ordered a black light. I am now offshore and my wife is at home dealing with it ha ha ha. She is less than impressed.

She didn’t even smile when I bought her a present before I left

To be honest that’s a sensible precaution, you shouldn’t handle them directly if you can help it.

Don’t the rats get suspicious if they have to climb over several of their dead buddies in order to stick their head in the tube?

Oddly enough, no they actually don’t. if anything they’ll eat each other and/or move their dead buddy out of the way, but in the wild, the idea is that other predators will also scavenge the dead rodents. But I’ve had three kills in one night early on, so they plainly don’t care. Also various YouTube vids showing the same.

Great book about Rats and their off spring is Rats by James Herbert.Also Domain by same author

I also had quite a few as pets,lovely intelligent creatures. so clever and adaptable to many surroubndings, but not the wild ones, they bit hard,got bitten by a wild one,had to bang it repeatedly against a fence post to make it let go,as their front teeth slope inwards pulling your hand away doesnt work, and theyre very sharp and pointed. Needed a Tetnus after,and antibiotics.

Mate also got bitten buy a rat when he was child, broke his finger, he now has a deformed finger as he didnt go to hospital.

Also GOOGLE DOOMWATCH THE RATS, check the toilet bowl before you go after watching

masterdabber
Member
Sticky boards are worth considering. Not nice things but they seem to work.

They really AREN’T worth considering. They’re horrible, inhumane ways to cause a long lingering death. Rats will literally chew their own feet off trying to escape. I have no issue with traps, poison, air rifles etc but glue boards should be banned.

if anything they’ll eat each other

…but not the green wobbly bit.