I have a neighbor who has been hearing scratching noises in the walls and ceiling. They apparently got in through one or more broken vents Her exterminator suggests two approaches One is to set out poison. The downside is that the critters will die in the walls and smell up the house. The other is to set traps. The downside of this approach is the higher cost of checking and rebaiting traps.
What is the best way overall of handling this problem?
Charlie
As they're too large to let them die in the walls, I'd use just one or two traps, check and bait them every day until the problem is gone. Make sure their entrance has been sealed first
Think cat.
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Think stupid, as in "HeyBub" you're stupid.
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If cats are good enough for homeless people to eat, they should be good enough for a rat's breakfast.
A big cat, probably male, can eat rats.
I have well over two hundred customers that I have bait out for rats and I will maybe get a dozen, probably fewer, calls a year on dead odor. The rats can die and cause an odor but more times than not it doesn't happen. As mentioned for customers that insist on snap traps the cost is more. Most exterminators base their time $100-$125 an hour.
Lar
IN order to get the best answers, please put all the facts in the body of the post. Several of us usually don't read the subject lines.
how do you know it is a rat and not a mouse? Mice scratch too.
Forget the poison, the rats will indeed die in the wall. They likely use the wall interiors as nests, and forage at night. Find out where they are leaving the house, and set and bait with peanut butter, a Havahart trap (squirrel sized one) against that escape route, if it is near the ground. Then you might catch successive incoming and outgoing rats. Once the rats are gone, and no more trap action, cover the entrance to the house. The rats in my area are extremely wary of conventional spring traps, and avoid them. Roger
This was the opinion of the exterminator. He was there. Could have been a squirrel. In terms of the question, what difference would it have made? Are you an exterminator?
you would get the cat into the walls.
And then how would you get the cat out?
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: >> What is the best way overall of handling this problem? : >
: > Think cat. : >
CY: Sausage stuffer syringe. : : And then how would you get the cat out? :
CY: Shop Vac. : :
Towser caught 28,000+ mice (plus rats, rabbits, phesants, and other stuff).
Just how many mice have you caught?
A friend of mine lived in the country and had a similar problem. He baited them with poison and I guess the poison make them thirsty so they left the home in search of something to drink then died. Never had any smell in the house.
Dogs, of course.
The problem with cats is they will kill or run off all the rabbits, pheasants and other beneficial stuff but they will not make a dent in the rat population. If Towser killed 28000 (who counted them?) they had 280,000.
Seriously, if you want to be done with them, put out poison and keep it out even after the rats are gone.
Put it in places hard for kids/pets to reach
If you don't plug up the hole they are coming in you won't accomplish much. In spite of what I see here, I have had a dead rat in a wall and it is more than a monor little inconvenience. That was a relatively small roof rat. A Norway is a lot bigger problem.
Actually that is an old exterminators tale. With rats, they usually are not nesting in the home but are coming inside at night exploring part of their territory. The baits take a few days to take effect and when an animal starts getting sick they usually tend to try to hang out back at the nest. Mice on the other hand are more likely to be nesting in the structure itself, so much more of a chance for them to die in a wall, but they are one of the few animals that can live it's life without ever drinking water.
Lar
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