I spotted two rats using the greenhouse as their residence and the back garden as their playground yesterday. The bird table on top of a 5' piece of 3x3 turned out to be their outdoor dining room.
The cat, which used to be a superb ratting and mousing machine, now shows no interest in fresh meat on legs and prefers to be waited on hand and foot by humans carrying pouches of jellied protein.
Can anyone recommend a decent rat killing system? Poison? Trap?
If the cat was hungry it might start ratting again of course. I think also if a cat that was active has become sedentry, it might be worth the cost of a vet visit to see if there is anything wrong, as normally no matteer how much food they get they simply want to hunt as an instinct unless ill. Brian
.22 air rifle if you can get within 40 meters
20-30 is better.put some boxes of old newspapers and a target on the table, and spend time setting the sights up for that exact range.
Go for a head shot. You will either miss completely or kill outright. Heart and lung or gut shots wont kill immediately.
In message , F writes
Poisoned grain such as the link below worked for us. Handy if they're going in the greenhouse so hopefully nothing else eats it.
Nothing wrong with the cat that the recent transfer of the contents of our bank account to that of the vet threw up!
He's old. The cat, that is.
Management isn't going to want them shot (though, depending on my aim, it would be more 'humane'), and I don't do dogs, so this looks like the current method of choice.
Unless someone knows better, or cheaper!
you will of course kill all the birds as well..
F wrote: [snip]
Use difenacoum cut wheat rat bait it's very effective. Use bits of old drain pipe as bait stations.
Rat glue also effective but cruel.
As above: 'Handy if they're going in the greenhouse so hopefully nothing else eats it'.
Not if he puts it in the greenhouse, as I suggested. To the OP: round here the agricultural/pet suppliers have much cheaper brands, which I assume work just as well. The Rentokil was the first link I hit, not the cheapest. IIRC they do smaller sizes, which would be enough for two rats.
yiu think birds cant get into a greenhouse that rats can?
+1
And it's a bit of fun.
i HAD SIMILIAR BUT USED A 2 LITRE BOTTLE AND MADE THE SCREWTOP PART slightly wider and put the grain inside it, this prevented birds etc getting access to it.
I use Neosorexa which I buy in 5kg drums on the Internet (from a farm supplies place in NI) and proper rat traps (like these, although I don't buy them from Rentokill);
fasten them down, else you'll lose them. I assume either something takes the dead rats (fox? buzzard?) or wounded rats drag them away. Either way, the first two I bought vanished never to be seen again.
Here birds follow rat runs into the chicken runs, but I've never found one in the greenhouse - clearly they could, but they haven't. Also, I do put the poison in fairly inaccessible places and only leave it out at night.
I used a .410 shotgun on the ones living in the compost heap. And initially they saved me the effort of removing the carcasses by eating them
The greenhouse is sealed. They got in because the door was left open.
And in the greenhouse, if the pellets miss, maybe the falling glass will get 'em
Owain
In some parts of the country, Scotland for example, there are, or at least used to be, (bye-)laws preventing the 'discharging of firearms within x metres of a building' - I can't remember for sure what x is, but I think 50m.
?You were planning to eat the rats? Rather you than me :-)
Seems a bit overkill to me. Note that the discharge of all that lead into your compost heap is in principle at least not a good idea. Lead shot has a nasty habit of being ingested by other animals as they feed, and in the past the swan population of the UK has been seriously affected by ingesting lead fishing weights, which, IIRC, have now been banned as a result?
To the OP, I have written at length here before about keeping rats and mice at bay, I suggest you do a search:
+ Keep a strip of at least 30-50cms or so around buildings, etc, absolutely free of plant or other cover, with any grass mowed short. + Block up any holes, for example broken under-floor ventilation inlets, and/or where waste pipes come out through the walls of old buildings, etc. Check around guttering, barge-boarding, and eaves, as most rodents are expert climbers - a rat can walk along a wire. + Where central-heating is put into an old building, be sure likewise to plug effectively the holes where pipes go through interior walls, as otherwise the course of the c-h becomes a 'mouse motorway', allowing them to infest an entire building very quickly. + By all means use another animal to kill them - a good mousing cat can be very effective. + Traps can work, particularly against mice, but rats in particular are highly intelligent creatures - that's why they are still here, despite millennia of persecution by man. If they see an unusually 'easy' food source - bait on a trap, or poison - particularly if it seems to smell of man, they may well ignore it. Also, although you may kill the first rat, subsequent ones will probably learn, and the same trap may well be ignored, and you have to move it elsewhere, and perhaps 'wash the smell of death off of it', before it will work again. Although cheese is the conventional bait, I have been told that bread crust is better.- I'm not really in favour of using poisons. Although the blurb always says "They will die in their holes, out of sight", in practice any very distressed animal is likely to behave abnormally. Rodents that have been poisoned, rabbits in an advanced stage of mixametosis, etc, all are likely to become very confused and dazed, and wander around unnaturally in broad daylight, and therefore be taken your own pets or by natural predators.
Therefore, poisons always pose a significant risk of travelling through the food chain in an unintended fashion. Not only is there the risk of collateral damage to foxes, buzzards, kites, crows, etc, but eventually as it disperses there is too little poison to effect a kill, so animals, including the intended target species, have a chance to become resistant to it.
In fact, there was much talk in decades gone by of 'super-rats' and 'super-mice' that had become resistant to Warfarin, the poison most widely used at the time.
At any rate, if you do use poison, do everything you can to ensure that the poison itself cannot be taken by other animals, and that the corpses of any victims are discovered and burnt.
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