A rat got in, probably through a door being left open.
It’s been in the home for about three days and the two idiot cats have been doing an awful job getting it. Seriously, I came in to the kitchen yesterday because I heard the cats making a lot of noise and they were chasing it across the floor. It vanished under the refrigerator and so I got on hands and knees to try to look under the nearby cupboards and such, and a minute later when I got up, it was - I shit you not - looking down at us from the top of the fridge, vanishing when I went for it with a towel, nowhere to be found.
Well, I found it in a plastic bag on the floor where it had been rooting around, the cats on either side and attacking it through the plastic. I picked it up with the bag and placed it outside, hoping it would just run off, but it’s lying on its side in a really tragic reenactment of that run-on-the-floor thing Homer Simpson does.
How can I humanely kill this thing? I guess I could put it in a bag and smash it but I have a feeling it’d take a few tries. I could also just put it in the dumpster… but this thing was a valiant foe and I think it deserves better than that. I’d prefer a relatively painless way to do it.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure he’s a goner. One of the cats injured it and it’s given up on flopping around but it’s still breathing. It squeaks when I nudge it with my shoe but can’t get away.
I Googled and apparently I can euthanize it with carbon dioxide by putting it in a tupperware container with vinegar and baking soda, which I have. I think I’m gonna go that way unless anyone has objections in the next few minutes.
IMHO the freezer is less traumatic if that is a concern. If he is badly injured he’s already in pain but the deep freeze will quickly cause him to go numb and basically just drift off into a deep sleep with no added trauma or pain. I don’t know much about the vinegar/baking soda method but I can’t imagine suffocating from noxious gas is less traumatic than drifting off to sleep.
You’d be surprised how resilient they can be though. If your real wish is to release him back to the ‘wild’ you might leave him in a box in a dark, quiet place in case he is just in shock from the attack.
ETA ah well… you spared him some pain in either case.
It was on the ground outside for about an hour between me first putting it out there and making the post. I hope it wasn’t just in shock or whatever but I don’t think so. It’s done in any case and it only took a few moments for it to go still.
Did you observe it while it was in there? If so, how did it react? To be clear: I do not ask this question out of ghoulish curiosity but so that I know whether that method causes pain if I ever need to use it. I want to know if this method causes pain and discomfort.
Are you sure it wasn’t carbon monoxide?
If it’s any consolation, it probably had one of the better rat deaths.
It freaked out when I first scooped it up with the container and again when I started pouring in the vinegar but once I’d poured it in I sort of tilted it back so it pooled on the other side and it wasn’t actually immersed in it. It calmed down after that. Then I poured in the baking soda and closed the lid. It didn’t visibly react to that part at all so as far as I could tell it wasn’t in pain. Then I held it there until it stopped moving, which took somewhere between 30 seconds and a minute, I think. I kind of shook the container to see if it would start moving again and it didn’t, but I wanted to be sure it wouldn’t wake back up or something so I set it down again and went back inside for a few minutes. Now that I think about it I could have just set it in the dumpster still in the container right then, which is what I wound up doing anyway.
I wouldn’t say it was “comfortable,” it was scared, but again as far as I could tell it went out painlessly. It just drifted off.
Google is confirming that vinegar + baking soda = carbon dioxide. More Googling shows that carbon dioxide (not monoxide) poisoning is used by lots of places for euthanizing rodents. I guess if I could recommend one thing if you’re planning on using this method is to have two containers - a big one and a small one. Put the small container in the bigger one and pour the vinegar into the small one, that way you don’t freak out the rat by getting it wet.
This was the first thing I thought of and it would be for sure painless if you got it one hit. But I don’t know, maybe I’m just a huge pussy but it’s pretty visceral and I was worried about fucking up and just torturing the damn thing.
For future reference, don’t use carbon dioxide to asphyxiate anything.
The breathing reflex is governed by the level of carbon dioxide in the blood. The higher it is, the greater the need to breathe, the more frantic the behavior, and the more discomfort is felt.
If you want to asphyxiate something, you fill the container with something that isn’t oxygen or carbon dioxide. Probably the most easily available gas is nitrous oxide in the chargers used for whipped cream dispensers or one of those party tanks of helium. I’m not saying you’re likely to have one on hand, just that it’s more easily available and a better option than carbon dioxide.
Looking around more online I see that there are a lot of concerns about the amount of pain caused when using CO2 to kill lab rodents. A hammer to the head through a bag may have been the preferable solution after all. At least it didn’t take long before it was unconscious. Better than if I hadn’t chased off the cats, I guess.
Yeah carbon dioxide is a horribly inhumane way to kill something, as far as I’m aware
Hammer, shovel, swift stomp of the boot… anything would have surely been better (though much messier). Carbon Monoxide, however, is deadly and swift and also peaceful. But to get a source of it, you’d have to burn charcoal or something in an enclosed area. Not easy.
We recently had a rat that somehow managed to catch itself in the trap so that only its hind legs were under the bar. The poor thing was eek-eek-eeking horribly in the backyard. My husband quickly got a big shovel and plunged it straight down onto the rat, and killed it in an instant. It’s icky, but it’s fast and effective.
Nitrogen, maybe. It doesn’t trigger the gasping reflex that concentrated CO2 does. CO2 causes a panicky, gasping, desperate death. Nitrogen…you pass out before you even know you’re short of Oxygen.
For a rat, I’d just put on a big pair of boots and stomp him.
Nobody has mentioned the rat zapper 2000. I know it would not have worked in AClockworkMelon’s specific case but for future reference?
I had a serious mouse infestation some years ago, before I had effective cats. I researched and figured this was the cleanest and most humane way to kill many mice - they had happy thoughts right up until they didn’t have any thoughts at all. “Yayfoodyayfoodyayfoodyayfo.” And it was a no-brainer to dispose of the dead ones, since the blinking light let me know if one was dead in there, and I didn’t even have to look at the remains.
It really worked too. The larger ones catch rats, the smaller one mice.
Mice I simply stomp on or whap with a shovel. To kill other small animals I use a small plastic bucket with lid or a plastic bag (if it’s not going to claw its way out), and a small towel soaked in car starting fluid, which is about half diethyl ether, a primitive anesthetic. The animal goes to sleep rapidly with little obvious stress, and if you leave the cover on for 10 minutes or so it never wakes up.
The obvious warnings are don’t breath it yourself and it is very, very flammable. Use outside only.
(I’m sure that someone will want to tell me what a bad idea this is. Don’t bother.)
At least it didn’t take long before it was unconscious. Better than if I hadn’t chased off the cats, I guess.