Recently I found a small rat in one of the kitchen shelves. I managed to catch it and remove it while all ladies in the house locked themselves in the living room, screaming!
I could not work out how the rat could manage to come into our kitchen. With the door to outside closed all the time, there are practically no 'holes' to outside that it could pass through. Anyway, this evening we found another smallish one in our garage again!
I wonder what is the best way to prevent rats from coming in our house/garage, and when they are in, how to get them out (or 'put down' them) efficiently. Any advice would be most welcome.
Call the council pest control officer in. They have stuff that will clear them out. The stuff available to the public will only make them grow fat and breed.
I note your use of the word *practically*. Either there are holes or there aren't, and if there are, then that's where they are getting in. They must be getting through a hole even if you can't find it, unless they sneak in when the door is open. How about through the roof/ceiling area?
Yep. In addition to that, they will try to find where they are coming
*from* and fix that. There may be a missing, broken or lifted sewer manhole, broken sewer etc - so that, no matter how many are killed, they keep arriving. Any little old neighbours not been seen for a while?
If you are surrounded by farms, a neighbour who keeps (badly) chickens and have a river/railway at the bottom of the garden, then you are going to get them - practically no matter what. Plus voles, field mice, frogs, annoyed badgers, lost otters etc.
A standard, low-tech spring-type rat-trap works. Melt chocolate onto the bait-plate and it will last for months. Put it in an (empty) ice-cream box with a lid and a small hole made in one corner. Apart from the safety aspect, a rat tends to thrash around spraying blood everywhere for the fraction of a second before it realises that it is dead. If you put a mouse-trap in the same box, it works even better. As well as catching mice, should you need to, a rat will sometimes trip one and, constrained by the box, land on the other..
This year, touch wood, my score of dead and dying bodies has been zero. Helped by the neighbour with the chickens moving to France, perhaps. Well, one wounded stray cat on the doorstep, that I think had picked a fight with an otter. Hell of a mess.
My late husband left such things, along with drawing pheasants, gutting trout, etc to me..."women's work".. His role ended when he took his boots off. ;)
I had a similar problem a couple of years ago. A likely entry point is via holes around plumbing entry/exit points, e.g. where pipes come in under the sink, behind units etc. Fill them or any other holes with wire wool packed tight, from hardware store. External entry points would only have to be small.
Get the council guy in, I agree. They may lay bait stations under your unit kickboards - don't buy any poison yourself, they may be immune or die slowly underfloorboards etc, leaving a nasty smell as they decompose. And that is assuming they eat it.
Avoid leaving *any* food out in the kitchen (including leaving toasters out, put them away at night). Do any neighbours have overflowing bins, binliners etc in yards - or even leave bread out for birds? If the latter, tell them to pack it in and get a bird feeder, as I had to do to one bloke 3 doors away - when you tell them about rats they usually stop! A healthy feline population in the street may help (our cat has killed 2 rats in the last year, one about 10" long), but not so well as with mice.
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