Rat Traps

Before undergoing rat extermination, it is important to know what problems rats pose. Rats are slightly bigger than mice. They chew away furniture, kitchen articles and even electrical wires, causing a great danger to your home. Rats are omnivores and eat almost everything. Rats prefer living in farms, fields and wooded areas. In a home, they will make their habitat in any foundation opening or create a hole themselves. Outdoors, their sharp teeth destroy crops. For killing rats, poison should be avoided as it might be harmful to the pets and small children, just like in mouse extermination. When you use poison, the fleas, ticks and mites residing in its body search for a new abode, is very dangerous.

Rat extermination method include both catching them alive as well as killing them. Snap traps and glue traps are the most predominant means of killing rats. Identify places that you suspect rats frequent the most and then place the traps there. Using rat poison increases the risk to humans and pets in the house. If you think that you don’t have enough time to tackle the problem yourself, then you can always take the help of pest control professionals. They employ their expertise to place the traps and use more effective baits to lure rats that you may not be able to get yourself.

Along with the various available rat extermination methods stated above, you need to make certain changes to your living conditions and habits as well. Start with cleaning your house. Rats like to live near a place where there is no scarcity of food. The various food sources in your house are an ideal attraction. Make sure that you don’t keep any eatable article in a chewable container. Those should be replaced by either tin or hard plastic. Keep your kitchen clean. You won’t notice rats during the day but at night, your kitchen serves as their dining place. Keep the basins of your home dry to devoid them of water. The garbage cans should be properly sealed even when kept outside the house. Minimize places where the rats may hide and seal every opening or vent that you suspect the rat might use to enter or exit your house. A female rat gives birth to 8-12 pups at a single time and does it 10-12 times a year. Imagine their exponential rise if the rat extermination is not tackled at an early stage.

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Rat extermination, just like mouse extermination, requires some knowledge about rats. Rats are bigger in size than mice and usually six to ten inches long. Rats eat almost everything; they are known to eat meat too. Rats prefer living outdoors in wooded areas and in farms where there is abundant to eat but they can live inside a building too in a vacant basement or any hole in the wall. If they reside indoors, they can cause you a variety of problems ranging from chewing away your furniture, kitchen articles like cardboard boxes and electrical wires, which is one of the leading causes of fires in houses. Outdoors, they destroy and chew away crops and plants. For rat extermination, avoid using rat poison as it might be harmful to your pets and infants. Besides, if you kill a rat by using poison, the different fleas and ticks previously residing in its body search for a new place, and can be devastating.

More and more people exercise humane ways to catch rats to avoid injury or death but the classical snap and glue traps are still used by the majority. Before placing a trap, identify the areas where the rats are seen the most. These areas would most likely be your kitchen or near the walls. Using rat poison poses a risk to pets and infants in the house. You can also try sealing off the entry and exit points to curb their movement. It is better to employ the services of a professional firm if you can’t deal with the problem yourself. These companies excel at employing the best and safest tactics at a nominal cost.

For rat extermination, you need to apply various extermination methods as mentioned above and make some changes to your place and habits. To start with, you need to clean your house thoroughly. Rodents dwell where there is sufficient to eat. Clean the kitchen and cupboards and replace all your chewable containers with non-chewable ones. Dispose all the garbage cans outside your house and seal them tightly. If there is a source of water like flower pots that the rats may use, get rid of it. If you are re-arranging your kitchen, do it in a way to minimize crawl places and fill up all the vents and openings in the walls. If you come to know of rat infestation in your house, act immediately. Rats reproduce very rapidly. A female rat gives birth 10-12 times a year and an average litter size would be 8-12 pups. If rat extermination is not done at early stages, the problems will always magnify.

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Rat extermination must be carried out swiftly and efficiently to contain the threats posed by these pests.  These animals are much harder to catch than mice.  They are intelligent and wary creatures that often avoid traps and poisons.  Amateur attempts to dispatch them often take an extended amount of time.  In that period, rats can continue to do structural damage, spread disease, and reproduce at an alarming rate.

Rats are tenacious creatures that will do what it takes to get where they want to go.  Their teeth are stronger and larger than those of mice, which allows them to tackle harder materials.  They can cause damage inside the home by gnawing through wooden beams or even concrete.  There have been reports of rats igniting house fires by chewing on electrical wires, posing an obvious hazard to humans.  Even if they don’t cause permanent structural damage, rats may cause unsightly injury to dwellings.  Their access holes can pop up in a variety of locations, like inside cabinets and through hardwood floorboards.  Their greasy fur also tends to leave dirty streaks along walls that are difficult to clean.      

Rats’ filthiness is more than just skin deep.  Their fur brings parasites like ticks and fleas.  Rats also transmit serious diseases that can prove fatal to humans.  During the Middle Ages, rats were partly responsible for the epidemic proportions of the bubonic plague, which their fleas carried.  Thankfully, the plague is no longer a common occurrence in most parts of the world.  Instead, rats are likely to carry diseases such as
hantavirus, lymphocytic choriomeningitis, and leptospirosis.  These ailments are transmitted in rat urine, which is liberally sprinkled along their foraging paths and can even contaminate human food supplies.  

Both structural damage and disease contamination will occur faster with a larger population of rats.  Even a few rats can be the start of a major pest problem due to their lightening fast reproduction cycles.  The common Norway rat, known more familiarly as the sewer rat, can be found in almost all of the United States.  This species can breed year round in a protected indoor environment.  A female is able to have 4 to 7 litters per year each containing 12 to 14 young.  Even a single female rat can multiply into nearly 100 vermin within a year.  

Rats’ ability to swiftly reproduce in staggering numbers can cause a population boom in mere months.  Each individual rat is another opportunity to introduce grave illnesses into a home as well as put the structural integrity of a house at risk.  Identify infestations quickly and pursue the fastest, most comprehensive rat extermination options available.    

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