Rats!

We have been having problems with rats lately. A few weeks ago neighbors on both sides put out poison, which by the smell did kill several but it also killed a couple of the neighborhood cats who apparently caught poisoned rats staggering around before they died. So with the decreased cat population, the rats have been able to mount a major come back since they reproduce much faster than cats do.

We ourselves are down to one cat. He is the cat equivalent of an arm chair sportsman when it comes to catching rats. He loves to sit at the edge of the drain and watch them below, but when faced with two or three on his level he just wants to come inside.

What to do? Well, I don’t want to put out poison because we don’t need to thin the neighborhood cat population any more. In addition to poison, the stores offer traps and rat glue and glue boards. The idea of the rat glue is that you smear it on a board and stick some bait in the middle. When the rat comes it’ll stick to the glue. You can also buy ready made “boards” with the glue already on it. It’s the same idea as fly paper but on a grander scale. The downside is that you then get to kill it. But that’s not the only downside. Rats often get only partially trapped and will drag the glue-coated board with them sometimes great distances, sometimes smearing glue all over everything in between. We once tried it in the village. One dragged the board until he fell in some water and drowned. But the worst was one morning we found only a paw. No idea where it came from but several unpleasant scenarios can be imagined. I decided that even rats don’t deserve that.

There are wire cage type traps but you are then stuck with killing the rat and getting it back out of the cage in whatever order you can make work. What I really wanted was an old fashioned spring loaded rat trap that kills the thing right off. After visiting 4 hardware stores, however, it seems there is a big demand right now and they were all out of stock. Finally we found something called TUFFCAT rat trap.

The TUFFCAT rat trap is a plastic gizmo a bit bigger than a computer mouse but otherwise very similar in shape. It’s easy to set and load the bait. So we tried it.

But,

Below you can see a rat sneering at our TUFFCAT. His buddy is just out of view.


Here he is eating the bait.

The trap did eventually spring but all it accomplished was to startle the rats. They came back later to see if any of the bait got dropped.

So I guess we have to try something else.

Someone once told me that plaster of Paris is a way to kill rats without endangering cats, dogs, and birds. You simply mix it in dry food. Unlike cats, dogs and people, rats can’t vomit and the stuff apparently hardens inside and kills them. Now if I can figure out what plaster of Paris is called around here...