rats what to do 61

OK. From the follow-ups and your responses, I get it that you are renting, and that you do not own the house.

Well, yes. At least about the rat attacking the baby. A rat is pretty small by comparison, and will avoid anything larger.

Since you rent, I can understand this emotion, but let me ask you what would you do if you owned. Would you let a raty run you out of your own home? How much of your own time and resources are you willing to spend to catch the rat.

Whoa! I think this is a bit overboard, too. Certainly you want to vacuum up any rat dropping you find, but I think steam cleaning every day is more than what is needed.

Long rat story...

We were infested with rats (as it turns out, two of them) for, I think, around a year (at least for the smart one :-). This is the story of our experience. Let me say that since we own our own home, moving just to avoid the rat would have been pretty severe, and I, for one, did not want to give up my home to a rat.

We noticed the rat droppings shortly after we got rid of the racoon. I suspect that somehow the racoon had showed or opened a way for the rat to get in. As part of the racoon abatement program, we had repaired the vents under our house so that animals could no longer crawl in. (This is one of the first things you need to do, also, expecially if you have a raised floor with a crawl spece under the home.)

At first, we did not see the creature, just the droppings, so we did not know we had rats and not mice. We had had mice in the past, so we tried mouse traps. These were occasionally sprung with the bait gone. At some point we got a clue, and traded them in for rat traps. On a couple of occasions, these were sprung, too, but no rat.

The rat came into the house through the openings in the walls, then into the kitchen through a hole chewed in the baseboard of a cabinet. It ate the bread and such that we left in the wastebasket bound for the compost bin. We started emptying the wastebasket every night, and the rat started climbing on the counter and eating the apples in the fruit basket!

Then on Niel's birthday last year, at a party, the rat came runnign out from under the dishwasher and hid under a chair in the living room We used the party guests to try to catch the rat, chasing him all over the living room. (I wrote the story about this up and posted it in m.k.b. I'm sure you can google for it!) We failed to catch the rat, but we did chase it out of the house, and the last time I saw it that night, it was climbing over the fence at the back of the garden.

It was back in a week.

I went around the house again, looking for and fixing any holes in the vents a rat could get through, then I called a professional exterminator.

He came out and set the same kind of spring loaded traps I had been using (almost). He set three traps. He set them up so that they sprung toward the wall (so the rat could not sidestep), he wired them down (so the rat could not drag them off), and he used peanut butter as a bait. We caught a rat the first night he set the traps. We hoped our ordeal was over. We were wrong.

After not getting any "visitors" for a month, we took up the traps. The rat started reappearing. At first, just once a week or so, then more often, until by the middle of the winter, he was back pretty regularly. He was much more discreet, though. At first.

He started eating fruit again, so we started leaving cut pieces of apple out for him next to the baseboard hole. Then when he took that, we would bait a trap at the hole. He never touched the bait in the trap. We tried contagion packets behind the washing machine (another of his favorite entry places), and we finally bought one of thowe electric electrocution traps. Of course he wouldn't go in.

He started getting bolder and bolder. He was going into the compost wastebasket again. One morning, after he had turned it over to get some bacon fat I had cut off and put in it, I had an idea. I KNEW this was the bait! I got a couple more cuttings, and baited the two professional rat traps I had left, wired them to the wall, and set the up on either side of the compost wastebasket. I heard a ruckus at about 5 o'clock, and the next morning found dead rat lying in a pool of his own blood the next monrning. Needless to say, I was estatic.

Since we have been rat free, and I hope we stay that way.

Larry