Thread: Help with a wise ole rat

Caberslash and Northdude have touched on some of the things I've found worked. A few further notes:

As Northdude said - baiting but not setting the traps helps. Multiple traps, all thoroughly baited but unset will eventually get the better of Mr Rat and he'll get used to having a free meal.

The standard wood base and wire Victor Rat Traps have always worked best for me. They're niggly to set, but trigger when the bait bar is moved in any direction unlike other traps. Plus you can lightly sand or file the bait bar to make it more sensitive. Putting most of the bait (peanut butter, chocolate, fat) on the underside of the bait bar helps in catching the rat since it's harder for them to get the bait - they have to work between the bar and the base of the trap, twist themselves sideways to get in there etc. Smart rats usually can learn to skim bait off the top of the trigger, but haven't found many that were able to remove it from the bottom. Some traps don't trigger by being wiggled or pushed upwards though. The T Rex traps haven't worked well for me. They're nice and sensitive and the small ones kill mice well, but the big ones don't seem to be strong enough for rats. Stopped using them after having three rats in a row caught but not killed by them.

Rats tend to drag traps off and die somewhere inconvenient. Wiring the trap to something or gluing it to a large base secure helps minimize the chance that it drags the trap somewhere inaccessible before dieing and stinking the place out. A trap screwed to a long board is great for putting the trap somewhere otherwise inaccessible, like a narrow roof cavity, inside a wall, or down a pipe. Just need to make sure that the trap has room for the jaws to swing when sprung and is well and truly secured so you don't end up with a rat stinking somewhere hard to reach.

A trap that works well on mice but needs to be way bigger for rats is the pop-can trap - basically a big pail or half barrel (for rats) with 15-20cm of water in the bottom and a wire stretched across the center of the bucket at the top, with a peanut butter coated pop can threaded onto the wire to form a rotating drum. A kink in the wire or nut on either side of the can stops it from being pulled towards the lip of the bucket. Rats and mice will try to reach the pop can and end up falling into the bucket and drowning. Rats have far better reach than mice, so a standard 20L bucket won't work. Would need to be a half 200L drum or something similar with multiple cans or a tube strung onto the wire. Especially nice for infestations because they don't need to be reset to keep catching.



A few rats proved far too wily and got the night vision and airgun treatment.