Monday, September 17, 2007

Holy f---. . . I need your advice (AGAIN)

I just wandered out into the garage to do a load of laundry. Turning on the garage light, I startled a very cute and healthy-looking but still very large rat in the rafters. He ran into a hole in the wall near the ceiling.

I've been hearing squeaking and scratching in the eaves/attic crawl space. I was really hoping for bats.

But no. The garage is a collection of messy piles of boxes--largely of paper and clothes. Do you see where I'm going with this? Maybe there's a family of rats. Which means I'll need to clean out my garage to find any nests.

This also means the landlord will place traps.

Which means dead rotting rats.

Which means I'll have to clean them up.

Or there will be poison.

With a toddler and a dog around. Oy.

Anyone ever used live traps on rats? We have lots and lots of fallow fields around here where I could release them far from town. Advice, please!!!!!

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

UGH. I have no advice. We thought we had rats but it did turn out to be bats and they are only in the eaves, outside. a friend had rats but sent her husband up to dispose of bodies and kept the kids out of the second floor of their house near the walk-in attic.

Seeking Solace said...

We had a HUGE problem with rats this summer. And I had the same concerns with using poison.

I put the rat bait (poison) around the front of the house fondation where I knew the dog would not go. I also purchased sensors that let off a sound that is suuposed to scare the rats away. You just plug them into an outlet.

You can use the bait traps also. They are like a small shoe box with the poison inside. But, I was too chicken to check them to see if they "worked". That was a job for my husband.

You should also check with you town to see if there are any other people in your area with the same problem.

Good Luck.

Breena Ronan said...

I just looked this up on a IPM website. If you kill the rats it may not help because new rats will most likely come in. One possiblity is to try to figure out how the rats are getting into your house and seal up those holes. On the outside of the house take a look at what trees or power lines are touching the house because those are like rat highways. You would still need to trap rats that are inside, but you would be trying to reduce the number of rats getting into your house.

Breena Ronan said...

I just looked this up on a IPM website. If you kill the rats it may not help because new rats will most likely come in. One possiblity is to try to figure out how the rats are getting into your house and seal up those holes. On the outside of the house take a look at what trees or power lines are touching the house because those are like rat highways. You would still need to trap rats that are inside, but you would be trying to reduce the number of rats getting into your house.

Anonymous said...

UGH. I'm the official bug-killer in our apartment, but I don't do so well with rodents. I like it when they eat their poison quietly and go die somewhere else. But I don't have a toddler.

Your catch-and-release strategy sounds like a good one, but possibly the only thing that sounds to me as unappetizing as checking for dead rats is driving live ones out of town.

best of luck

Rhonda said...

One consideration with poison is that you don't get to decide where the rats go to die. I had to help a friend cut through drywall to retrieve the rotting, stinky carcass of a rodent that had eaten the poison and then crawled inside her wall to die. The whole place reeked.

I would go with traps. At least you know where they are.