In article ,
"Ray Drouillard" wrote:

"Katra" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"Loki" wrote:

il Wed, 12 May 2004 00:43:14 -0500, Katra ha scritto:


I agree...
The rats have made it difficult to transplant corn sprouts! :-P
I usually just toss the trap into a bucket of water and walk away
for 10
minutes or so. If I don't have to watch, I can handle it.

When I catch rats by hand, I grab them by the tail and hit them
hard
against the nearest cinder block or tree, and that kills them.

The other morning, I found two nests and managed to kill one adult
female and 16 young rats that way. I watch carefully for nesting
sites
and clean them out about once every couple of weeks.

Gee where do you guys live? I have yet to *see* a rat. Let alone
need
to kill one. yuck what a topic....

Central Texas, suburbs...

I have chickens, they are attracted to the grain feed.
There is nothing I can do about that. I just have to find more
efficient
ways to kill the little SOB's. They are very prolific.

The general trick is to store the grain in a metal trash can or
something like that. Also, those dangling metal tube feeders work
well -- as long as the rat can't climb down whatever it is you dangle
the feeder from.

That would be ok, but a lot of grain ends up on the ground, especially
scratch feed. My storage is metal containers as rats would chew thru
plastic.


We had rats in our henhouse when I was a kid. My dad made a bait box
with a hole that's large enough for a rat to enter, but would keep a
chicken out. He put anticoagulant (warfarin) type rat poison into the
box every day. Sick and dying rats literally came out of the woodwork
after a few days.

Yes, that works. I use bar bait poisons and put them into suet cages,
and place them so that the chickens cannot get to them, or get to the
crumbs. You also have to make it so that the rats cannot carry off the
bars so the chickens might gain acess to them, hence the suet cages. :-)


It takes more than one dose to kill the rats, so the secret is to buy
five pounds or more of rat pellets, then keep the bait box filled. Just
putting out a box or two of d-con won't do it. The rats just get sick,
then get over it.

When I start poisoning, yes, I do use a lot of it.
The rats start dying after about 5 days and die near water containers
pretty much out in the open, which is nice as dead rast _stink_! :-P
Bleeding to death makes them thirsty.


After a while, the dead rats stopped appearing and the poison pellets
stopped disappearing. We haven't had rat problems since then.


Ray

Mine is periodic. I can wipe out the local population, but my neighbors
don't use any rat control and there is a lot of trash in the lots out
back. :-( Nothing I can do about that except for complaining to the
city, so the rats re-populate about every 2 years. This year is just
really bad!!! I am going on a major poison spree here shortly, and will
also set up some bucket drowning traps as was suggested earlier.

Thanks for the input. :-)

K.

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