Uncontrolled and wild rats aren’t as cute and lovely as their pet siblings. Rodent invasion and the question how to catch a rat at home are really hazardous. If you still sure that a domestic cat and a simple trap with a little piece of cheese will be quite enough to eliminate disgusting pests forever, you are far from the right solution.
Contents:
Turn Your House Into a Super Trap for Rats
Rats are lured into people’s houses seeking food and water. If the animals manage to find them in your habitat, they will come periodically. If you hope that the existing problem will be solved itself very soon you will be bound to get slough off rat nests.
How to deter rats in the house?
- Small dark fecal
- Musky odor
- Gnawed things from wooden to plastic
- Dead or live rats
- Scratching sound
Rats gnaw furniture, wires.
Since you noticed the signals, take effective steps to avoid the rats’ increasing infestation:
- Keep the surfaces and countertops clean and tidy. Don’t leave crumbs anywhere. Hungry rats will surely leave you.
- Check the walls, observe the floor and corners for cracks and dives of any size. Be very attentive, because the furry rodents are able to shimmy into a pen-sized hole in the walls. Leak them all when found.
- Use wire mesh to close all ventilation and drainage tubes.
Now, when you isolate house rats from their siblings outside, you will have quite an easy time to catch them with food.
First of all, choose between different types of traps, designed for capturing and/or killing rodents.
- Snap traps are proved most powerful invention for immediate rats’ death. Classical traps consist of a flat wood platform with a strongly tighten wire and a pan for putting a bait. Choose carefully, paying attention to the traps’ size. You’d better take different size if you are unaware of either big or little rats have found shelter at your place. Only installing a massive trap you get more chance to liquidate a big rat.
- Glued traps are covered with a super sticky substance, in which a rat will stay forever desperately trying to escape. This method is considered as inhuman as rats die continuously long from starvation or asphyxia. The sticky strips aren’t reusable.
If you don’t want to kill a rodent, similar traps won’t suit you.
How to Catch a Rat Without Killing it?
Non-killing traps are rather helpful when there are few rats on your territory. It is also a kind way of rats’ elimination, because you catch a rat in a trap, leave it alive with further returning it to nature.
To make your own live trap, take the following things:
- A high bucket, easy for rats to fall in, but impossible to escape.
- Peanut or else sweet butter will be ideal and least expensive bait.
- An empty plastic bottle, which should match the bucket’s radius.
- A thick straight wire.
- A pair of cuttersэ
Catch a rat in such cage and release it from prison.
- Drill two holes on the diametric sides of the bucket for the wire.
- Make the same holes at the bottle’s bottom and in its lid. Insert the wire into the first bucket’s hole, then through the bottle, its lid and, finally, thread it out from the second bucket’s hole.
- Use cutters to shorten and bend the extra wire ends. The bottle must rotate loosely on it.
- Now grease the bottles’ sides with the bait. This delicious rat-trap is ready. Put it in the area frequently visited by rats.
- Lean a piece of timber towards the bucket, giving rats an easy challenge to run up to reach a rotating bottle. Having noticed a delicious smell of their favorite food, a rat will definitely crawl up and try to enjoy itself with the bait. But the bottle will turn and the rat will appear on the bucket’s bottom safe and sound, but having no escape without your help of course.
- Your task is to control the trap regularly and rid of the found rats naturally.
How to Catch a Rat in The Garden?
Rats are a real nightmare for gardeners too, as the pests do not only frighten by its appearance. But rats can bite; they are contagious and harmful for plants and crops.
The main principles to catch a rat outside are also connected with the idea of keeping everything clear and tidy. Namely, you should:
- Grow bushes and trees at least 3 feet off the house. The grass should be neat and cut short.
- Keep wood at 18” up from the ground; put all the garbage into trash cans with tightly closing lids.
- Planting mint close to the house gives a smell that rats can’t put up with.
- Keep bird feeders away from the garden.
- Cats and terriers will also be your friends to get rid of rats naturally.
The cat will become your faithful assistant to catch rats in a garden.
How to Get rid of Rats Naturally?
Rats are of course wild animals, which prefer to live far from human habitat. If they appear in your garden, there are good conditions, quite suitable for them. Killing rats is insane and cruel.
One or two rodents in the backyard may be occasionally spotted when they come only for food. Take right measures until they create huge colonies around your house. What measures to take?
- Buy or make your own live trap.
- Keep a cat or a terrier, which will be hunting on rats or at least scaring them. To remove a rat from a live trap, put on gloves, replace the rodent into a safe container and drive it off your house at minimum 5 miles. Being at such a long distance from its previous forage place, the rat will have to tune itself to live in the new environment.
This is important: Leave the rat in some bushy and safe place to give it a chance of hiding from natural predators. If your house is properly protected and the backyard is well-cared, don’t worry, rats will never return.
