There's a rat my loft (what am I gonna do?)

Can't help you as such but the problem comes when they eat poison and die in a void somewhere, the stink!

Block holes with scrunched up chicken wire, they don't like that.

Broken glass mixed with strong mortar also works.

Don't their wee trails show up with UV light ?. So you can see what paths they are taking ?. Or maybe you have to spread UV powder and let them spread it .

Mice and presumably Rats will tunnel through Rockwool/glass fibre cavity insulation so sealing the neighbours holes worth trying. Wall trellis and climbing plants another route.

I do have a little UV torch, sadly loft insultation just shows up in various shades of purple flecks. Difficult to tell if there's any soiling on it.

We're next door to a mucky chicken shop at work in a terraced building about 200 years old.

It's one of those things i've come to accept is going to happen.

I've caught a couple of ratty things (or big mice at any rate) with spring traps baited with peanut butter. The traps are Rentokil FR51s, got them from Homebase.

We've got an ancient house, thick rubble walls and lath and plaster and there's no way I'm putting down poison, I'd never find the corpse without a pneumatic drill and sledge hammer.

IIRC a spring trap for rats is many times bigger, and with a much stronger spring, than a mouse trap.

When we had cats and lived next to a farm, they regularly caught rats. The OP should get a cat, or perhaps a Jack Russell terrier.

This is a bit like whack-a-mole, but different!

Video:

Fen mark IV are good for rats (and squirrels if used with a tunnel)

While I am all for killing rats, the apparent excitement and pleasure the humans got from it is very distasteful. The giveaway is that it is from a field sports organisation. Pleasure in killing is never pretty.

If there is one, there are probably others. It could be its just scaling the wall somehow and has access to a neighbouring loft. I noticed some years ago in mine that the dividing wall is pretty naff, the chimney seems to be holding them up either side and there are cavities here and there. This was built in 1939. Thus far nothing worse than wasps though. No trees for the Squirrels and the rodents seem to keep away, nothing to eat. As you say why would they be up there? Is there a loft conversion in the block, where food might have been kept? Brian

You're gonna get that rat, that's what you're a gonna do, you're gonna GET THAT RAT ... just to show that I spotted the reference to a great little song ;-) Slightly more seriously, and as others have said, all you can do in that situation is to try to ensure that Mr Rat is out and then block the holes. Alternatively, use poison (and block the holes) if you can tolerate a foul smell for a week or so. I had some persistent rats in a dry-stone wall just outside the back door. The bu&&ers dug into it and pushed-out lots of gravel from inside. I put the gravel back through one of their entry holes at the top and they pushed it out again at the side. Eventually vigilance, an air rifle, and many failures, consigned one to the septic tank but the other one was more canny. After a few weeks I spotted him/her looking out of a gap in the wall and bagged him/her with the help of some new sights bought for the purpose. I hate killing anything, but there was a thrill of excitement/victory/call-it-what-you-will as I got him in the cross hairs, pulled the trigger and watched him fall out of the hole to the ground like a stunt actor falling out of a high window. He became food for the septic tank.

These ones are superb, no messing, ratty or mousey disturbing the bait on these ones and its lights out for ratty or mousey! Saw one in operation a while ago its like hitting them with a sledgehammer!

Do mind your fingers!!

Peanut butter is one of the best baits around too..

No doubt about it and if there's two the chances are there will be alot more than two fairly quickly. B-)

This time of year it's warm and dry... They aren't daft, they come in from the cold and wet.

a big rat is as big as a small cat or rabbit. Normally you need a cage trap for them, Mice can be amazingly big if well fed on table scraps and sleeping lazily in house insulation. Almost up to guinea pig size -0 certainly bigger than a hamster!

Great ratters are JRs.

What a snowflake you are.

Looks as if you've had no takers then. Maybe he's having a rest.

Rats are interesting. Even a person with no hatred, or even dislike of any animal might be persuaded to take a dislike of rats solely on account of their gnawing away at the wounds of still living soldiers in WWI. That and all the "Black Death" stuff, I suppose.

However some written accounts of WWI showed soldiers as viewing rats in just the same as any other life form, including the Germans. All doomed to sharing that same bleak existence in the trenches. With everyone and everything, being reduced to doing what it, or they had to do, to stay alive.

While elsewhere there are plenty of accounts of how rats make great pets on account of their being very intelligent etc.

. michael adams

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You're forgetting that we are animal just like any other and one that is a hunter. Modern society has a veneer of "civilisation" but that's all it is, a veneer. Not very far down is the hunter and creature that will kill to feed or protect its family group and immediate community.