rat control without poison

[jadelennox]

Content note: Animal harm to a bald eagle, implied to rats.

From Universal Hub: Local bald eagle dies of rat poison.

I know the rat problem is out of control, and there's only so much an individual can do with traps and good trash management when we live in a city. But the poison is killing the raptors which, traditionally, control the rats. For what it's worth I've been trying Contrapest rat contraceptives; I don't know yet whether it works well enough. (Also dry ice, which you can buy in pellets at Acme down Kirkland and Beacon, near Inman, poured into the tunnels if you know the entrances, seems to help as well.)

Comments

[squirrelitude]

A few months ago, elusiveat asked me: "Why are rats even a problem?" And as far as I can tell from what people complain about, they're *mostly* a problem because they chew into trash bins looking for food. And then the food feeds them, and then there are more rats, which chew more trash bins. (And if you're a homeowner, you might get fined.)

But... if you compost your food waste, you don't support the rat population and the rats don't damage the bins. It solves both sides of the problem at once. (Instead they try to chew your compost bin, but for some reason I hear this doesn't seem to be a big issue with the curbside composters.)

For completeness, the other concerns I've heard:

- Rats sometimes chew car wiring (as do squirrels)
- They can spread disease (I'm not clear on how)
- People just don't like seeing them?

So there are still reasons to not just like... have open piles of compost, like we do in the country. But honestly, the city just needs to implement municipal composting. It takes away the food source and that is *far* more effective than trapping and killing.

(But yes, if you find a rat nest, you can put a few pounds of dry ice over the entrance and then pile dirt on top -- it should kill any animals in there, with no residual toxins.)

[jadelennox]

Speaking as someone who mostly tries to live in harmony with wildlife and really doesn't mind, say, the mice in the house, or the raccoons who sometimes make an unspeakable mess in the yard:

• I home compost, and that absolutely supports the rat population. I could switch to pickup, I suppose, but the 100% most rat-friendly part of my house that I can't bear to change is the composting.
• Also the rat tunnels destroyed a large part of my garden last summer, killing all the strawberries in a raised bed and doing a number on a lot of other berries.
• But more importantly, they did thousands of dollars of damage to my garage last winter, because it turns out they can chew through cinder block when sufficiently motivated, and they almost pulled the garage down. So they are quite honestly actually a problem.
• Also apparently an abandoned car turned into a massive rat breeding nest a few blocks from here last winter.

(Not to mention that, with apartment building and dunks' dumpsters all around my neighborhood, there are so many rats that all the commercial spaces are going to use poison as long as they're allowed, because traps take daily maintenance which is more than commercial property managers tend to bother with, and then the rats get eaten by the raptors and also die horribly in my basement. Banning poison would solve that problem, obviously, but unless the city is aggressively dry icing on both private and public property, people will just use illegal poison.)

[squirrelitude]

Ooof. Yeah, I don't hear about them getting into homes that often, but garages and sheds are a different story. And I forgot about the damage in gardens, even though I'm pretty sure that's why I didn't get any tomatoes this year. I've been operating under the "gotta get rid of rats" model for a while, but I couldn't remember *why*. This definitely fills in the picture a little more!

I've managed to successfully exclude rats from a backyard compost bin before, but it's hard. Previously I've wrapped hardware cloth around an Earth Machine composter to great success, but I've since learned that the galvanized metal contains lead. ;_; I think stainless steel chickenwire might be the best bet. And then "yard edging" plates stuck into the ground around the bin to deter digging.

Right now I have rats (and squirrels) eating out of our bin, but it's a bin that a former housemate put together and it isn't a very defensible design. I need to replace it. In the meantime, sprinkling super-hot cayenne powder in there seems to act as a deterrent, at least for a while.

(Worm bins also work great if you have basement space.)

I really do think that curbside composting is the only way forward, along with ordinances to require its use in all commercial and residential properties, with *actual* enforcement.

[lb_lee]

it turns out they can chew through cinder block when sufficiently motivated

Jesus. Today I done learned!