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

[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!