i have a rat

[jd_1138]

I have a rat in my garage, too, but I'm glad it's there...
Sorry that's no help...

Tommy

454? What's that beast going into? '55 Chevy 210? I'll race ya. I have a '70 Goat with a 455ci Super Duty with Ram Air. It's on like Donkey Kong.

 

[6t7gto]

Read the text first so you don't get bored.
The comment are pretty good also.

 

[shedfullatools]

Just be careful with poison if that's the route you go, they ingest it then wander off and die somewhere. Sometimes the place they wandered off to is in the walls, attic or typically someplace that only the utmost amount of destruction will get them out It ***** a lot more to deal with the smell than the living rat you hardly ever see...

 

[EnduroRdr]

A few years ago, I was on the couch watching TV...out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move along a nearby baseboard. It was a bit dark in there, so I had to sit up & double-take. A couple seconds later, a mouse started moving again, toward a louvered cold air return grille on the wall about 4 feet from him.

I leapt off the couch & dove toward him, just as he got to the grille. He got his head & front legs through the louvers in the grille, as I grabbed his tail. He managed to get his back legs through too & was pushing with all his might! I still had him by the tail. I yelled for my son downstairs to bring a screwdriver up QUICK!

He unscrewed the two screws while I held the tail, then we took the grille & mouse outside, and let him go. I couldn't believe he got his whole body through the grille! I'd have to measure, but IIRC, the gaps between the louvers are only a little over 1/4", maybe a tiny bit wider.

LOL [emoji23] [emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23][emoji23]
Like a Ninja! Good story, thanks for the mental image!


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[LS6 Tommy]

454? What's that beast going into? '55 Chevy 210? I'll race ya. I have a '70 Goat with a 455ci Super Duty with Ram Air. It's on like Donkey Kong.

It's a "warmed up" LS6 454 GM XAA code crate engine I bought new in 1987. It's going in my Grandma's 20k mile 1980 Malibu Classic along with a Legend LGT700 5 speed, a Global West suspension, 4 wheel disc brakes and a 3.70 geared 9". It should be adequate...

Tommy

 

[Sawdustmaker]

Had a rat come into the garage a few years ago. Scared the **** out of me one morning as it was on my bench when I came out to go to work!

Turns out a small population had developed around our composting pile. Got that cleaned up, and used good old fashioned rat-sized snap traps. I set a few in the garage and a few outside, perpendicular to the outer wall as rats like to run along walls and edges and always take the same routes. Nailed that f*cker outdoors on the second night baited with peanut butter.

He had chewed through the weather stripping at my garage door(s). Evidence was plentiful. Haven't had a problem since. Also shot a couple of them around the same time under the bird feeder with my vintage Crosman .22 pellet gun. That was fun!



Dave

I've had luck with the Victor rat trap baited with peanut butter (creamy or crunchy doesn't matter). I also secure the trap to something (branch or a stake) with wire so if the rat is only partially caught he can't escape.
Also have used my Benjamin .177 pellet gun to take out rats and squirrels. Squirrel==>Rat with a bushy tail.

 

[bwringer]

Yep, the old-fashioned snap traps are still the most effective way to deal with rodents.

Remove food sources, remove bedding materials, and seal 'em out the best you can. Accept that there's really no way to keep the bastards out if they really want to get in.

Set traps and check them daily.

 

[marius_nortje]

Read the text first so you don't get bored.
The comment are pretty good also.

I got one of those work under my deck .It does get them on rainy nights when there feet are wet.Got 3 one night

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[My Old Tools]

Rats and mice are limited to the size hole they can get through by the skull. They cannot compress their skulls. In the case of a rat, generally that means a hole the size of a quarter [25-cent piece] or a crack or seam around a door or window that is as narrow as the skull is thick. My wife has a house in Boston, and there is a real rat problem there. She has been fighting the problem for over a year. Fingers crossed, looks like the problem is contained, but I am not putting any cash on the line for betting it's over.

A mouse or rat can squeeze beneath or through a crack [garage door one example at the bottom of the door] that is about the thickness of the animal's skull. We saw this happen one evening, and it is amazing to see.

I always thought it was an urban myth that rats can come up through a toilet. However, this also happened in the Boston house. The evidence was finally found while a local handyman was at the house tearing out some old cabinets in the basement to try to find a point of ingress from the outside for the rats. He had spent countless hours sealing up holes, etc. over many months. He took a break to go upstairs to the second floor of the house to the bathroom. As he walked into the room, a rat ran out past him. The bathroom floor had wet rat tracks, as did the rim of the toilet. The rat was soaking wet. Later that day, with the old cabinets in the basement all torn out from the wall, he found an abandoned ssewer clean-out with the cap gone. The feces around that spot showed the rats had been using the clean-out as a way to get into the sewer line, then they crawled up the line for two stories, through the water-filled trap in the toilet, and into the room. He plugged the clean-out, and that was apparently the last way they were getting inside the house living quarters. Earlier that day, he'd found the final ingress point which was a hole to the outside for the basement sump pump hose to run. The space around the pipe was about a quarter inch in size and the insulation around it had been chewed and pushed away. He sealed that, and for the first time in years, no rats inside [yet] or for the past five months.

All this meaning that it is extremely difficult to stop the rats coming into a house, even more insane for a garage or old, leaky basement. We had put out poison and traps, checking them a couple times a day for over a year. Problem with poison is that the rats would eat it, then run away to their places of hiding, such as inside walls, die, and begin to smell. That is another bad story, but for now we're getting a bit of a break [hope, hope].

Good luck.

My daughter has a condo in a brownstone in Back Bay. She also has a 26# cat. He knows his business

 

[kbs2244]

I have to agree with jives.
Nobody has A rat.
They are colony animals.
We have talked about them many times.

 

[srr]

A cat is no guarantee. I have two semi-feral cats and a rat got in the house. I THOUGHT I had the house sealed up pretty good...This little SOB defeated 3 different rat traps. Don't waste your money on "sticky" traps as I saw his foot prints on one of mine. After a sleepless night after it got in my bedroom I cornered him behind the dresser and shot him in the head with my Daisy BB gun. He took off behind my desk and another point blank shot to the head. He took off again behind the dresser and another shot to the head! He took off and hid behind a plastic bin and just froze when I moved it. Shot #4 sent him sideways doing that thing Curly did laying sideways on the ground. I slid a sticky trap under him and waited a few minutes to make sure he was dead. Tough little *******!

 

[fsae0607]

A cat is no guarantee. I have two semi-feral cats and a rat got in the house. I THOUGHT I had the house sealed up pretty good...This little SOB defeated 3 different rat traps. Don't waste your money on "sticky" traps as I saw his foot prints on one of mine. After a sleepless night after it got in my bedroom I cornered him behind the dresser and shot him in the head with my Daisy BB gun. He took off behind my desk and another point blank shot to the head. He took off again behind the dresser and another shot to the head! He took off and hid behind a plastic bin and just froze when I moved it. Shot #4 sent him sideways doing that thing Curly did laying sideways on the ground. I slid a sticky trap under him and waited a few minutes to make sure he was dead. Tough little *******!

I get tree rats in my backyard since my backyard is adjacent to a wash. I've plugged a few in the summer time when they come out while we're outside. Last one a I shot twice with my Daisy BB gun and it ran off. They can be tough!

 

[bubinga]

I'm Saying, that cats (s) are going to get worms, or disease from rats.
Unless you'ns don't care about the cats.
But that's not very kind to the cat.

 

[-Brent-]

I haven't seen one come out of a toilet but I have seen a pretty large mole come out of a floor drain in a restaurant I worked at back in high school. It shocked the absolute hell out of me. There was a good possibility he could have made it out of the kitchen and into the seating area, which would have been bad news for business. A kid I worked with stabbed it with these two-pronged forks we used to turn the pizzas with and tossed him in the dumpster.

The boss game him $100 at the end of his shift, that night.

 

[myredracer]

My rat story: Built a house years ago near a wooded area and at framing stage, found that a something had chewed a hole through the 1/2" plywood sheathing on ground floor. No problemo, just cut a piece out and put in a new patch. Go look the following day, another hole in the same exact spot. Now very p*ssed off, I go looking for whatever was responsible. Find a rat running around. No problemo, I'm pretty smart, so I grab the cardboard box that happened to be nearby and go to corner it and trap it in the box. OMFG, very VERY bad idea... Rat gets on hind legs, bares it's teeth and lets out a blood curdling scream. Wow, did I even move fast to get outside. Used poison in that case because it had nowhere to hide. Then I dismembered it and put a body part on a stake at each corner of the property and no more rats.

Yea, don't poison it because you could have a dead carcass in a wall (dead rats smell awful). Suggest a big rat trap with your favorite cheese for bait. One thing that attracts rats is a source of water so if you have one, eliminate it if possible.

 

[bubinga]

wow, he was a mean *******.

 

[Ray-CA]

Install a good size snake.

Ray

 

[BellyUpFish]

I'm building Barn Owl boxes...

 

[MarcSeattle]

I read a tip for when you see holes for mouse or rat burrows in the ground. Buy some dry ice and stuff it down the rat holes, and try to stuff all of them. The cold CO2 gas will drift down to the bottom of the burrow and quietly put them to sleep, then death.

Humane, and the carcass is already buried. I like it.

 

[MarcSeattle]

By the way, I live in a city where chickens are legal in urban yards. What a stupid idea. The rats get a regular source of food, then have litters every three months. Every litter is 6-12. The pups take only a couple of months to become breeding age. Rat population explosion.

When I was in high school I worked a bit helping out at the chicken farm of a friend's father. This place was like a fortress. A concrete pad extending 12' around the building with corrugated steel top to bottom. No gaps or holes anywhere. No plants around the building, nothing on the pad/apron, no tools, no boxes, nothing to climb up. Doors that sealed. The huge ventilation fans were well off the ground. Everything spotless. I remember asking Mr. Richardson why it looked so over-engineered. He said he wanted to be a chicken farmer rather than a rat farmer.


_

 

[Sawdustmaker]

Now you need a cat!


Jack Russell Terrier works better.

 

[Ben Jamin]

I live in Tampa bay Fl where we have "fruit rats"! Same damn Norway rat I detested growing up on a grain farm in the midwest. These bastards have been more of a nuisance than normal due to an above average year for Live Oak acorns and I suspect that I have a neighbor that is not picking up old dropped fruit around their urban orange & citrus trees.

The rat activity has got so bad that in the evening one jumped up on the back of my tv under my covered patio/lanai! Me & my dogs freaked out chasing the sob with a vengeance ! Caught him the next night in a spring trap. I can only guess that he was looking for a warm spot as that night was cooler than normal(low 50's).

I've been using spring traps with some success and recently set out a bait trap from do it yourself pest.http://store.doyourownpestcontrol.com/proteca-evo-ambush-bait-station I positioned the box on our privacy fence where the rats run on.

The bait trap allows the rats to go in and get the poison without it getting everywhere for my dogs to get into. I've set it out and refilled it and I'm noticing much less activity. The design is that the poison drives the rats to water and we have a lake in our neighborhood.

 

[Kpaige]

I was working in my shop late one evening and heard a little noise I looked around but could not find anything. Lots of leaves blowing and it was nice out so the big door was open. Wrapped up shut everything up and was not able to get back out for 2 weeks.
Then I was out there working and my son eent around the back of some tools and said WTF I jumped up went back and there lay 2 dead rabbits. Must of died of dehydration and fear. Felt pretty bad on that one.

 

[maxpower_hd]

http://www.victorpest.com/victor-electronic-rat-trap-bm240promo

I had one and got these. The thing was laying in there dead by the next day. Now I leave them in the garage just in case one gets in. It has an indicator light that tells you if it killed one.

A friend of mine recently used this exact trap. Works great. He loves it now. LOL He also got a chipmunk in it but in my opinion that is a plus.

 

[My Old Tools]

I'm Saying, that cats (s) are going to get worms, or disease from rats.
Unless you'ns don't care about the cats.
But that's not very kind to the cat.

They don't have to eat them to kill them. My daughter's 26# cat thinks they are toys. When he gets through throwing and pouncing on them they look like dish rags.

 

[My Old Tools]

Install a good size snake.

Ray

A good king snake is deadly on rats and mice.

 

[Weird Tolkienish Figure]

Rats are actually rather shy, and aren't as brave as mice, usually. Get rid of his food supply to get rid of the rat. I had a rat who would park under the bird feeder and eat the birdseed. When I got rid of the bird feeder, we got rid of the rat.

Also, rats will stay away from larger predators like cats even if a cat usually won't tangle with a rat. They will harass the rat though, enough to get rid of them.

 

[TractorJeff]

On the Farm we had a Feral Female Cat that would jump in a Grain Silo to kill a Rat! She killed everything including her litters as we never saw any offspring....

 

[bubinga]

They don't have to eat them to kill them. My daughter's 26# cat thinks they are toys. When he gets through throwing and pouncing on them they look like dish rags.

LOL..............OK..................

 

[My Old Tools]

His feet look like big old furry plates....Spiders and scorpions don't fare well either. Anything that moves after the lights go out ends up flat in the morning light.

 

[bubinga]

His feet look like big old furry plates....Spiders and scorpions don't fare well either. Anything that moves after the lights go out ends up flat in the morning light.

OMG he kills scorpions. Bad a$$ Cat.

 

[My Old Tools]

Norwegian Forest Cat, similar to a Maine ****.

 

[myredracer]

But they are sooo cute...