Do You Have a Problem With Rats?
Rats might be big but they can squeeze through a hole that is only a half-inch square. A man's thumb would be challenged by a hole that small but a clever rat can do it. And rats are clever. They can walk along wires, swim, and climb. This makes them very hard to contain and keep out of your home. It even makes it difficult to get rid of them. Even worse, there is no down time for rats. They work all year long.
If you look around your home, it is easy to see signs of their presence. Start by inspecting your pets' food dishes. If you have rats, there will be rat droppings around the cat or dog food dishes. Pet food is a real treat for a hungry rodent. Sometimes, your pets will find the intruders and try to help by attacking them and often the pets succeed and proudly bring you the carcasses.
Listen carefully at night for the sound of scuttling in your attic or walls. It could be rats. Rats are active at night. Check your storage areas for nests in chewed boxes or the back of your closets. Check your rafters too for signs of smudges left by their dirty bodies slinking around. They love garbage and will burrow around your garbage and solid waste areas. They also love to burrow in gardens and lawns.
They are not invincible. They have terrible eyesight. However, their hearing and ability to memorize routes through your house are both keen. They are canny about self-protection and can adjust to their new habitat quickly. They also are clever enough to avoid eating new foods that suddenly appear. If the new food is left available for several days, they begin to trust it. They do like cereal, meats, fish, and nuts. Some like fruit and berries. These make great bait material.
Having a rat problem is serious. A rat infestation can destroy your home quickly by chewing through walls and rafters. They will eat and contaminate your food. They will spread disease, wreck your house, chew your electrical wires, and damage your insulation. The diseases include food poisoning, typhus, and fever.
Mice are bad enough but rats are a real hazard to you and your neighbors. Getting rid of rats is a challenge. They are a public health nuisance and can damage the entire area. Complaints about rat to environmental health services can force the issue.
So how do you get rid of rats? Snap traps or electronic rat traps are the best method and they are reusable. Set them in places where rats tend to travel and these tend to be hidden areas. You can use glue traps too but rats tend to drag these around the place and because rats are big, glue traps don't kill them and then you are faced with that distasteful task.
Poison does work but you end up with dead rats stinking up your home, as they will die inside your walls. If they have fleas, the fleas will survive but leave the dead host and go looking for another warm body to live off.
Young rats are easier to deal with but only because traps work better at killing them because they are smaller than the older rats. Live traps are not ideal either. Setting rats free is counterproductive. They are disease laden, some are not natural to the area and in the wild, they can damage the ecosystem. So you are faced with a live rat and no safe place to set it free. The alternative is not always easy for humans.
To impress the need for advance prevention and immediate control, once you see that they leave tracks, you need to know how bad the infestation can be and that some people report seeing rats in toilets. Imagine how disgusting that would be.
There are many products on the market for rodent prevention and control. Electronic rat zappers are one of the most common and advisable. Rats are nasty and dirty and you really don't want to deal with a live one. Nor do you want to have their rotting carcasses in your walls.
The great thing about zappers are that you don't have to touch the dead animal. They have a special mechanism that allows you to dispose of the rodent hygienically. You can read more details on the zapper, or visit our website to learn about how to get rid of rats http://www.pest-control-products.net/
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