escape wrote in
news
On Thu, 10 Feb 2005 18:04:10 GMT, "99windstar"
opined:

Yes I agree rats are everywhere BUT normally you don't see
them on a regular basis.

I see rats almost daily in my gardens. They are giant
sized, fat as cats. Cute as any other creature I've seen.

really? i don't have rats...not i don't see rats, i don't
have any. if i did, the barn cats would gift me with them.

When you start seeing them then there is an infestation.

There's already an infestation whether or not you see them.
For every person, there are about 500 or more rats...on
the planet. NYC has over a billion rats. In my yard I
count about 12 adults.

where do you live? i have a farm, with livestock, with the
attendant grain storage, but no rats. i have lots of mice,
voles, moles & woodchucks, red & grey squirrels, chipmunks,
but no rats.
the previous owner had a rat problem, but he used wooden
grain bins. i keep the barn tidy & store grain in metal trash
cans with bungeed lids. the chicken feeders hang from the
rafters, so no grain at floor level. i also have two chubby
little barn cats who are excellent vermin hunters.

When the
fruit trees didn't have anymore fruit on them and the
ground was cleared the rats decided to move to our house.

Getting rid of the fruit trees won't prevent this. Good
hygiene, proper pruning of branches near the roof, closing
off any possible entrances with wire or mesh, putting some
tanglefoot where they enter, etc. will help.

this is true. i don't think the trees caused the rat
population explosion. how far away are the neighbors & how
clean do they keep thier yard/house?
since the rats have moved in, getting rid of the trees won't
help. you need to find what they're eating in your house &
clean that up. rats don't stay if there's no food source...
but if your neighbors have a food source, it's possible they
will live in your house & go next door to eat.

Now the rats are the demons everyone
makes of them! They eat and destroy the wiring and
insulation under the house. We don't store food in the
garage and our trash is in containers. We have had terminex
here to find why we have such a population of rats and the
fruit trees are the only food source we have around our
yard. We do have bait stations out and are noticing a
decline in activity. We just want to avoid getting in this
postion again. These rats are huge!
We don't want to dig up the trees because replacing them
with other non fruit bearing trees would be difficult since
our yard is a steep slope.

are your garbage cans metal? are the covers tightly fastened,
as in bungeed closed? where is thier water source?
if your house has a crawl space, you need to screen it off.
make sure you have no leaking pipes to supply water. keep all
your dry goods (flour, pasta, grains, etc) in metal or plastic
containers. rats are lazy. they won't live somewhere where
food & water aren't easily available.
oh, and consider getting a cat, not any cat though. you need
a cat that comes from a barn cat background. while most cats
will hunt from instinct, house cats tend to not be as good at
ratting as cats that haven't had the instint bred down. spayed
female cats are better hunters than males typically, although
my male barncat is pretty good. his sister is still better at
actually killing things. Rudh tends to 'play' with his prey &
they escape more often.
i note you said you'd replace the apple & pear with other
fruit if you *did* cut them down anyway, so i see you really
don't think they're the source of the problem. if you really
thought the fruit was a problem, why would you just plant more
fruit?
oh, & since you only have one apple & one pear, *someone*
within a mile of you must have more fruit trees to pollinate
yours (or the pear, at least, wouldn't be fruiting. they
aren't self-pollinating, & apples fruit better if cross
pollinated), so that may also be the source of the rats.
lee