The paste that goes inside is not poison, just tasty rat bait apparently. The traps are high enough and far enough back in the pantry that I’m not worried about the cats getting into them.
the first looks like a mouse trap too.
a mouse trap will make you have discomfort if it snaps on your finger. a rat trap will cause a serious bruise and broken blood vessels. so using rat traps need caution in placement. death is most instant with the trap for the appropriate animal.
rats and mice like to run along walls that is good placement. on the path to food is good.
the anticoagulant baits i’ve seen are peanut based so grain loving animals are attracted to it. cats and dogs seem to show no interest in it, though instructions caution against using it in the open with pets and little kids about. though these baits can be used in bait stations (enclosures with holes just big enough for the target animal), these also keep the animal from stealing the bait chunks and caching them, they have to eat their fill (a fatal dose).
Have you tried snakes?
Well, I’ve had to dispose of a rat in a glue trap before…he was big enough that it wasn’t so much “putting him out of his misery,” as “making sure he couldn’t escape.” I’m not kidding—he was moving the trap around just by hopping, and looked to be close to breaking free.
I used a snow shovel (I guess bringing one of those to coastal northern california really was a good call). He was probably dead after the first blow, and definately was after the second and third. The rat received a Viking* funeral shortly afterward.
But really, the best way of cutting off the rat problem is to cut off their access to food. Metal garbage cans, and seal up that pantry—enough metal flashing to seal out martian brain transmissions and a few new floorboards seals up mine.
*Strictly speaking, I think it was a Roman funeral. He got his own pyre, in any case.
Find the external entry point, or you won’t ever be rid of them… as long as they can get out for food, they may just ignore the trap bait entirely. Also, getting rid of the ones currently in the house won’t prevent new ones from coming in unless you plug up the entry holes. If you’re renting, find the entry holes and get your landlord to fix them; otherwise, stuff the hole with steel wool (they won’t chew it, it hurts their mouths) and cover it with wire mesh and/or foam. Keep vegetation away from the exterior walls of the house, as that gives them hiding places, and makes it harder to find potential entry holes. Cutting off their interior access to food won’t prevent them coming in - they like warm, dark places to nest, and will be quite happy to live inside and just go back outside when they’re hungry.
You can tell by the size of the pellets if they’re rats or mice. If the pellets are between the size of a hamster pellet and a jelly belly, you have rats and should get rat-sized traps. If the pellets are more like the size of a fennel seed, it’s mice and mouse-sized traps will be fine. Although, if they’re knocking canned goods off the shelf, they’re probably not mice. Peanut butter, by the way, is a great lure if you find the stuff you’re using doesn’t work. If you do end up with a still-living rat in a trap, put the trap in plastic bag, place it in front of your car tire, and just drive over it; it should be effective for finishing the thing off without having it be quite as personal as a shovel.
If you want to tackle the outside problem once the inside is settled, look into bait boxes; they’re designed so only rodents will be able to get in (i.e., entrance holes are too small for cats). Rats go in, eat the poison inside, and then go back to their dens to die. Secure the bait box(es) near a wall (rats like to run along walls because it feels more safe) and just check periodically to recharge the poison if needed. If you get the blue poison discs, the area around the box will be nicely decorated with bright blue pellets, so you’ll know they’re going for the poison, heh. I wouldn’t want to use bait boxes inside the house, because then you don’t know where they’ll decide to die - at least snap traps inside mean you can get the bodies out of the house.
Ugh, writing this has my senses on hyper-alert and jumping at every house-settling noise. I really wish I didn’t have the experience to offer advise on this.
We have been dealing with a rat problem lately as well. We are pretty sure they are coming from our next door neighbors house. He is pretty much a hermit, that we have only laid eyes on 2 or 3 times in 11 years. His house if falling down around him. Every year we seem to get more and more rodents in our house…the more his place falls apart, the more critters we notice around our. And, this year it was a RAT! UGH.
We don’t have any pets right now, so finally went with poison, when the traps didn’t work. We found one dead rat just outside of our porch, and probably have/had another one under our house. That is the bad part about using poison. We smelled “death” for quite a few weeks, and had to have windows open and a fan blowing constantly. It is getting damn cold in Wisconsin, so we can’t do this forever.
We are not seeing signs of any others right now, but are also thinking about getting more traps. I can’t deal with the smell again. We used glue traps that were never touched, and will try snap traps next time.
In the mean time, my husband has been going around the house patching like a mad man. It is something we should have done a long time ago. We just never thought we would have this problem in this nice quiet, fairly clean little town. 
We also alerted the folks down at the town hall, to the problem. We were told to call our county’s health department and “Rat” out our neighbor. We may do that, but haven’t yet. Other people have since told us, that when you go that route, they will be sending out people to check over his house, our house, and probably other houses on the block.
The woman who is our town clerk stopped me on the street the other day to say that a letter was sent to our neighbor about cleaning up his place. But I am not going to hold my breath. He has apparently got many letters to do the same thing, every year.
Also…I have heard there is a poison, shaped like a cigar, that will kill a rat, and also stop it from smelling bad when it dies. I need to do more research on this, because if there is a product like that, I am going to stock up on it! Anyone ever heard of this?
The question in the OP confuses me. Why would you want to get rid of rats humanely? Mithra gave us rats so we would have vermin we could sadistically massacre without suffering the twinges of conscience.
like others have said, the next step is proper placement - along the walls, behind things - rats/mice avoid the open floor/counters most of the time - they run with thier side up against the wall. - so place the bait portion torward the wall.
as for the cats getting to them - put them in places that you have found pellets and that the cats cant generally get to. Behind/under stoves, refigerators, in the cabinet that you had the evidence, etc.
Peanut butter is a great bait - it requires effort for the rat/mouse to get off of the trap, giving more time for the trap to work. (Hint: bait the trap before setting it!)
I litterally meant spring traps - http://www.acehardwareoutlet.com/(e3xde1vrstgypen2onxfthvf)/ProductDetails.aspx?SKU=70736 - simple, effective and cheap - all that extra plastic stuff can get in the way.
Be careful with poison though–not all will “go back to their dens” to die,* and the smell of rotting rats in the walls is… less than pleasant. Also, should a cat find the dead rat and eat it, also no bueno.
*true story: one chose to do it wedged between a 200g display aquarium and the wall, so that his little rat paws pressed to the glass and rat face with this expression: :eek: was on prominent display as a backdrop to a gorgeous cichlid setup.
I believe you are thinking of Haflings, Sir. They are somewhat difficult to tell apart.
No they’re not. Rats are inedible.
Based on the pellet size I would say these are probably small mice then, though I have no idea how a small mouse would manage to toss about canned goods like this. We have the traps set up along the walls so hopefully we will come home to traps that have been set off and mouse corpses and no more pellets. I will start finding entrances into our place and filling them as well.
Which is why I suggested making sure the external entry points are closed up before using exterior bait boxes, and only use spring traps inside (so the dead are “contained”).
i agree that if they are moving canned goods they are not mice. a mouse would climb obstructions like that effortlessly and are not heavy or strong enough to push over.
the anticoagulant baits cause them to get real thirsty and they go seek a source of water which is often outside a building.
cats i’ve seen like hot meals. i suppose if starving they might resort to corpses.
Worse is when they manage to get holed up in the walls, but not well enough to keep flies from getting to them. (Though they might have just had fly eggs on them before death, I suppose)
Even worse is when they do this above the ceiling level of the first floor.
Even worse still is when they do this, right above the kitchen. A kitchen in the middle of remodeling, so it’s not really sealed up.
Luckily, most of the things on the upper shelves were just pots and pans. The plop-ping! noise pelting on metal, not unlike the first heavy drops of coming rain, gave a much appreciated warning.
When you look up “TMI” in the dictionary, you find this post.
Hhhuuuurrrrrrrrrpp!