Like most cities, mine is inundated with rats. They’re drawn to green spaces, places with pet food, pet poop, and fruit trees. In my neighborhood we have a school with dumpsters, a park, a green belt, a watery ditch and tons of fruit trees, so we have tons of rats in the area.
Every year I see rats in the fruit trees that line the fence of my back neighbor’s yard and I spend enough time picking up fallen fruit with rat bites in it that I started a compost bin. While I’ve never seen a rat in my house, I’ve noticed more rats in the yard lately, maybe due to weather or an increase in food sources, so I’ve decided it is time to start controlling the rats.
A Brief History of the Rat:
Roof rats came to America by way of the English colonists who settled in Jamestown and subsequent ships thereafter. Ironically, England no longer has roof rats, as the Norway rat, being better adapted to their cold climate and more aggressive outcompeted them. The last surviving roof rats were culled between 2017-2018.
In America, we have both roof rats, Norway rats, and now we have nutria, which are 20 pound jungle rats, which are spreading from San Francisco through the delta and produce even faster than roof rats.
I’ve seen Norway rats rarely in my area but the roof rat is extremely common in my heavily treed city. Roof rats are so called, because they dwell on rooftops but really just in high places, like tree tops, although they will also burrow bear food sources if trees are not available nearby.
Other Options Besides Eradication
The best way to control rats is remove food sources. Unfortunately the food sources belong to my neighbor, and I actually enjoy eating the peaches that grow into my yard anyway. She also raises chickens, which also attract rats.
Rats eat anything edible including things people turn their noses up at, like dog poop, dead animals, and poisonous husks from invasive tree species which produce inedible fruit. Because rats will eat anything with calories in it, it’s hard to remove all rat food sources, but I have done what I can to limit food sources in my yard. We pick up pet waste as soon as it hits the ground, never feed pets outside, and I have even had a tree removed. We had an invasive tree species, a china berry, that grew toxic little balls that are poisonous to dogs, but the rats seemed to live on them just fine. The tree in my yard was large enough to contact a tall stand of bamboo in the neighbor’s yard and another tree and some power lines which created a rat super highway. I cut the tree down and for a few years I only saw rats in my neighbor’s bamboo.
A few years later, we replaced our back fence and tore the bamboo out of my neighbor’s yard and for another year the rats seemed to have mostly moved on.
Below the bamboo grew a peach tree and it was shaded by my tree and then the bamboo, with both of those gone, the peach tree basically tripled in size and started producing mega quantities of fruit.
It seems that no matter what flourishes in the area, the rats find a way to live off it. For 15 years, I’ve largely ignored them unless they’ve come into my yard, which has been a handful of times. Once they built a burrow under the china berry tree and another one behind a tree that was growing too close to my shed. I removed both burrows with extreme prejudice and for the most part the rats have left my property alone.
Another way is to seal entrances, the rats are outdoors and I want to keep it that way, but there is no way to seal them out from outside.
Another way is to remove vegetation that they use for shelter, like bushes, trees, and grass. I’ve done a fair bit of that as well.
While non violent methods are important, in a neighborhood we can’t control our neighbor’s yards and rats are a persistent pest that I’ve concluded cannot be left to their own devices.
What About Relocation?
While it would be possible to perhaps catch the rats live, and then drive them out into a field to let them go, I’ve decided relocating rats is not viable. For one, they’ll be someone else’s problem, and most farms I’m guessing use poison which can harm the wildlife.
I could take the rats into the forest, if I wanted to drive an hour, but rats are non-native, they eat bird’s eggs, and are destructive to the environment and this is not a recommended way to control rat populations.
At the end of the day, there are just too many rats, and the most ethical and responsible thing to do, is kill them humanely and in a way that doesn’t hurt the native wildlife.
I’m a typical red blooded, meat eating, American. PETA, is not an organization I take seriously but I thought I’d check to see what they recommend for dealing with rats. Their recommendation is to catch them if they come inside and to simply relocate them back outside into your own yard. If rats become too abundant, they recommend catching them and taking them to a veterinarian to be euthanized, which I’m guessing would run about $50 a rat. No thanks.
The (Messy) Business of Killing Rats
Rats are docile, sweet, and intelligent creatures. They are almost as intelligent as dogs, can be potty trained, can learn commands like come and sit, and can even learn their names, they are social animals that live in communities. They have families, friends, and have rich inner worlds. Apparently they can even dream about the future. Rats are also cannibals and sex freaks, and I suppose that is the dichotomy of the rat. Each female rat can have over 70 babies per year. At this point I wouldn’t care if they spoke the King’s English, I’d still bag em and tag em, and that is the dichotomy of man, we can find something that is amazing and impressive and still destroy it without remorse. I do find the eradication of the local rat population unpleasant, I believe it is doing my neighborhood a favor, though I must admit, I have grown to have a respect and appreciation of the rat through trapping them, but I still believe it is necessary to remove them through the use of lethal traps.
Rats can carry fleas, parasites, lice, TB and lepto, a disease that can kill dogs. My best buddies in the world are my two little doggos and not only do I want to protect them, I want to avoid a situation where rats are roosting in my attic or outbuildings. They can be destructive to property and that includes wiring which can create fire hazards.
Ultimately the rat is at no risk of extinction, they are prolific and repopulate quickly and while it is a tragedy that some must be culled, it is a basic reality of wildlife management.
Don’t Use Rat Poison
Rat poison is a passive strategy, you can leave it out for years and if a rat finds it, they’ll die. No muss no fuss. The problem with rat poison is that neighborhood cats, raccoons, birds and dogs scavenge dead rats and can be poisoned. I don’t like poison, but the times I’ve used it to get a shed rat, it worked great, but once I learned of the dangers, I have refused to use it, although, I’ve had two rats find the box of unopened poison in my shed and use it to take themselves out of the gene pool.
My fight is against the rats, not against the owls, hawks, raccoons, and other animals that run the night, so I have decided to use rat traps.
Snap Traps
Kill Bar Traps
Wooden snap traps are about $3 a pop, but I don’t trust them and have nearly snapped myself with them a few times.
I decided to go with the Power Kill traps made by Victor. These are plastic traps that have a safety locking mechanism that doesn’t slip. You can even adjust the trigger plate so that that’s it’s already half tripped, making it a hair trigger.
What’s nice about these traps is that for $3.50 or $4.00 a trap, you can just spray it off and use it again. Each trap can kill dozens of rats before wearing out.
These traps feature a large “kill bar” which is intended to crack their little skulls or break their necks. VOOSH! Instant death. That’s the promise, of a snap trap.
After some non-lethal snaps with these traps, I switched to the Jaw style traps.
Jaw Traps
Besides the kill bar style traps, manufacturers make jaw style traps. These usually are made of plastic, have removable bait cups, and are easier to set. The neck breaking, skill cracking action is through the biting power of the jaws.
The nice part of these traps is that the bait cup is removable, and releasing the dead rodent from the trap is a matter of just squeezing the back of the trap to open the jaws.
These traps have only given me 2 non lethal strikes, and have been a favorite of the rat. I think part of it may be that the power kill or traditional wooden snap trap lies flat, and rats may think they can travel over it which results in them getting a kill bar to the mid section. The jaw style trap opens up like the jaws of a crocodile and they can enter it but it wouldn’t seem like something a rat would want to walk over.
Bait Selection
Rats eat almost everything and therefore are not often hungry. I’ve tried baiting with peanut butter and never had any rats try it out. This time around I tried slim jims and sardines, as well as the bait that came with the trap below. Nothing worked until I added sunflower seeds.
The CO2 Powered “Lamborghini” of Rat Traps
I’ve tried snap traps in the past, and never had any luck. When I came across the A24 Automatic Rat Trap by Goodnature, I was intrigued. It’s a self resetting trap that can kill 24 rats before needing to be refueled. It has a 6 month supply of auto dispensing bait. It’s designed to work in a similar way as poison, you can set it and forget it, but without the risks of secondary poisoning (the bait is non toxic).
On the upside, it has bluetooth and notifies you of every strike.
Notes On A Rodent-cide
The A24 trap’s app and bluetooth are buggy. There is virtually no documentation. I set up the trap correctly, but the app kept saying it wasn’t synced. What I found out, a bit too late, is that the “sync” happens only when the trap is set off. I reached out to their support team, and they were not much help. I went back into the app, deleted the trap and tried to add it again.
Unfortunately the app won’t allow me to add the trap, it keeps saying that it’s already registered. I tried reaching out to the support staff again, they told me that it wasn’t possible to delete the trap, and that I could pop the battery out to reset it. I confirmed I did delete the trap from the app, and they told me they’d report it to their tech team. Then they ghosted me. Then suddenly the app repopulated with my trap, but it still hasn’t fired so I don’t know if it works.
I found clones of this trap without the smart features on Aliexpress for $50, so I decided I’d return this $200 trap and get 2 of those and still save $100. I reached out to Amazon, and they told me they don’t want the trap back but refunded me anyway and told me to just keep it. I’ve left it set up but so far, the rats want nothing to do with it. I had unfortunately decided to return it before the app relisted the trap, but I did give the A24 team 8 days to fix it. Even after they fixed it, I wasn’t notified for another 2 days, so I can’t complain about them too much but if the documentation was clearer and the app had a brief walkthrough it would have eliminated some of my biggest irritations.
One selling point of the A24 trap is that the kill funnel the rat sticks its head into is too small for squirrels, dogs or cats, and other wildlife. Snap traps will snap any finger or paw that sets off the trigger. As it turns out, my dogs find the Goodnature brand bait so attractive, they will not leave the A24 trap alone and I can’t leave it in an area that the dogs can access without having them knock it over to try to get into the kill funnel. The trap can’t hurt them, but it also can’t function if it’s not left alone by the dogs.
The bluetooth feature, if it worked, would mean that I could put this trap in my shed and if any rats were killed by it, I’d get a notification and go check it. This gets me to the major lesson of pest control:
Managing Pests Is An Active Task: The Ugly Truth About Snap Traps
For a snap trap to be successful, it has to land precisely on the head or neck of a rat. Most snap traps are designed to be entered from the longer side, not the shorter side. The shorter side of the trap, which I call the front, goes up against a wall or fence, the rat on it’s path encounters the trap, and sticks it’s face in and WHAMMO, gets a bar to the head.
I’ve trapped 15 rats in the last 8 nights, and 4 did not die instantly. I had one get snapped on thr back leg and another two get snapped on the mid section. One somehow got snapped in the leg before getting his back end snapped in another. Most people don’t tell you this, they set a trap, check it in a few days and find a dead rat. The truth is unless you actively manage the traps, the rat may suffer for hours or days before dying, and the humane and ethical thing to do is check the traps frequently through the night. Last night, I found one killed instantly with a snap to the neck, and saw a other one on the fence, I waited for about 5 minutes until I heard the snap just to make sure that if it did bite I would be there to handle it if it wasn’t instant, and it wasn’t, so I was glad he or she didn’t have to struggle until my next check. My point is, trapping pests requires being responsible and respectful to life, even if the pest is seen as some as just a rat.
I set my traps up around 5:30pm, allowing enough time for the trap to sit and for any scents of mine to disappear. The rats start to get active around 6:30pm and stay active until 11:30. I start checking the traps around 7:30 or 8, and check several times throughout the night.
If a rat has a snap that is not immediately lethal, the trapper will need to put the rat down as swiftly as possible. The best way I’ve found to do this is with a .22 caliber airgun pellet to the upper half of the rat, ideally in the heart / lungs which seems an instant blow.
While it is quite unpleasant, leaving the rat in pain for any amount of time is just not acceptable to me, and that’s why I had hoped the a24 trap would have avoided the issue since it can only strike the rat’s head.
There are ways to improve the odds of a successful snap, and that is to build a box that holds the trap and limits the way a rat can enter the trap. The fence the local rats use as a highway, has a cubby created where two meet and that has been a highly successful trapping location for me. The trap fits in such a way that the rat can only enter one way, and every strike here was been instantly lethal, even on a huge male rat. I will be exploring an option to build a trap box to see if it makes the whole experience better for every creature involved. I’m also going to try to figure out how to convince the rats to use the a24 trap, with different bait options.
I also set up a camera so that I can monitor the status of the trap remotely, Wyze makes cheap pan and tilt cameras that can be used for monitoring.
Baiting
Trapping outside I believe is a little different than trapping inside. I’ve only trapped outside. I suppose if you had rats indoors you could just remove their food sources and then the trap would be the only thing for them to eat. I’m trapping outdoors and my goal isn’t to get 1 nuisance rat, I want to eliminate them and reduce their population for every yard connected to mine. That means I need to lure rats from those yards to the kill zone.
Rats have a lot of stuff to eat in my neighborhood including open bags of chicken feed and fallwn fruit that the elderly neighbor behind me leaves out. I need to offer them something better than what they can find in abundance out there. The trick to baiting a rat, I’ve found, is to put extra food around the traps to attract them to the area. Just putting a dab of peanut butter into the trap isn’t going to get the rat into it. You need to give them a little taste and get their appetite going. Once they get used to feeding at that area it’s just a matter of time before they find the trap. The rats I’m dealing with like sunflower seeds. The combo of PB and Sunflower seeds has been irresistible to them so far, and I’ve had some success with m&ms, and birdseed, and a dog treat or two. You don’t need to put too much, and you want the larger portions to be in the bait cup, but sprinkle some sunflower seeds around and dab some peanut butter or chocolate sauce near the traps.
Rats have a wide pallet but they seem to refuse some foods as quickly as they devour others. I think the best strategy is to lay out a buffet of options and see what they like.
The best way to find where to bait is to look for droppings, and rat litter. I noticed some near my back fence, the posts that connect all of the back neighbor’s fences together had rat scat and peach pits on the cross beams and on the ground below. So this is where I set the traps up.
Success So Far
As of my last count I’m up to 15, not counting the one I initially found that had died from getting into the poison I had not set out, so 16 in total.
Initially I was catching 2-3 a night with the first strikes happening as early as 7:30pm. Lately I have had nights with zero catches or 1 rat with strikes happening around 12-1am.
I’m not sure yet of that means that I’ve eliminated one colony that was closest to me, and these rats are traveling from a few hundred feet away, or if the rats I have left have learned from having 15 of their buddies disappear into the night that something on my side of the yard is dangerous. This is a trait rats have called “trap shyness.”
Plans and A Call To Action
I plan to continue to trap rats until I have a stretch of several weeks without a capture and will leave the automatic trap baited and armed perpetually.
If you live near rat food, which is nearly anything with calories in it, you probably have a rat colony within 150-450 feet of your home. Check for rat activity outside, around your garage and garden, if you find any signs, do the world a favor, and kill some rats.