Yet another thread for the purposes of awarding a cockpunch

This winter we had our fist major visitation from rats for the first time in about 7 years of keeping hens.

Pain in the arse.

How do you deal with them? I might phone the Council. Or I might just buy poison and some of those plastic poison holders. Our garden backs on to some allotments which makes us quite susceptible to visitors.

Shitloads of bait.

They were in our neighbour’s garden too and she also put bait down.

I don’t find those plastic holders particularly useful for outside, because of weather etc and they’re not practical when you keep hens because they’ll peck the bait. We had some spare lengths of plastic drain that we were able to lay at the edges of lawn and fence and put the packets of bait (which is inside edible bags) in those.

Starve the cats

If at-all possible avoid bait - they crawl-off and die in the most inconvenient places and the stink is quite summat, but also the corpses are eaten by dogs, cats, foxes, birds, etc, who are poisoned in turn.

Traps are better but require more effort since rats are smart, so need some time to get them used to the presence of the trap before you actually bait it. Peanut butter FTW. Cage traps not snap traps, as the latter will catch birds more often than rats.

Drown the rat in the trap in a bucket. You need to not be a pussy about this bit.

A good powerful air rifle can be fun, but only a minority will be incautious enough to amble about in daylight.

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Not around here. This is the only thing that works…

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Attractant-Natural-Poison-Free-Attracts-Re-baits/dp/B00B2KMSFW/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1524820000&sr=8-4&keywords=mouse+bait

Christ! In Oxfordshire, even the fucking vermin are pretentious foodie wankers! :confounded:

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Only the best will do :sunglasses:

Muppets on TV referring to Prostrate Cancer :roll_eyes:

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I have found if I run a hose down one of the hole for 24-48 hrs it calms them down.

We talking about your Farmers mate?

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I was afraid there wasn’t going to be an easy answer. I’m too much of a pussy to be hands on, but the poison has too many draw backs.

There haven’t been many yet this year. Previously we’ve had them & on one occasion I opened the hen house to find one very large & glossy coated specimen lying where the eggs are laid which looked at me with a sort of insouciant “What?” expression!

I’ve previously put a bowl of poison underneath the hen house. The rats don’t seem to spread it far & hens/birds can’t get at it there. That has worked although I did find one rat dying from the effects last year, managed to get it into a pan of water, held it under for a bit whereupon it woke up, wriggled free & escaped. Found it dead on the drive the next day.

They do occasionally get up into our loft but it’s all traps & peanut butter up there & they don’t last long.

Aye… Our not-so-bright previous neighbours had a pheasant shoot.
They fed the baby pheasants with corn, which they dumped in a 4 ton pile on the floor of their barn.
All of a sudden there was 000s of rats - big well-fed fuckers they were.
So Daft-but-Posh neighbours put poison everywhere.
They had a lovely labrador called Cooboo (don’t ask), who took ill suddenly and died in awful pain. It had eaten one of the poisoned rats.
And the plague of rats only stopped when the thick twats finally removed the 4 ton food-source!

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Last year, a nearby farmer knocked down one of his old barns and the houses around us were plagued with rats. When we all got together for a few beers one evening, the fellow residents (who are mostly dog owners) were moaning about this and asked us how many we’d seen. Our answer was easy - none as we have two cats and, even though they’re spoiled rotten, they have no trouble catching rats! We’ve even seen the two of them working as a team to catch a particualrly big b*stard that was living under a pallet that was outside our garage for a while.

Since then, we’ve noticed a remarkable increase in the number of cats in the area, and no-one has had any rat problems.

Forget the poison and bait - use nature’s answer.

Which is fine if your cats are bold. Our two are fucking lazy, timid and thick, and so only catch all the harmless things we don’t want them to - rats (and mice indoors) they completely ignore.

Ours is half feral and quite happy to take down rats, mice and even rabbits. Petrified of the chickens mind.

Ours are fucking shit

Ours just brings live mice into the house as gifts :roll_eyes:

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Yep both ours do this, they are SO thoughtful…Rosie Dog loves it as she spends the next however many hours on a search and destroy mission, usually ending successfully :open_mouth: