Hi DolomiTTe
Welcome to the Forum!
Great news that you have hogs visiting your garden. A bit sad about the rats – not easy to deal with, but you will find lots of topics relating to them on the Forum, with some ideas. This is a link to some of the older ones (if you follow the link, it contains links to others), but you will find there are more recent ones, too: https://www.hedgehogstreet.org/forums/topic/rat-probelm/
Re. the sonic rat repellers. I was told a while back by someone who actually made those repellers that they don’t really work outside. They said that if anyone tries to sell you one, ask for a money back guarantee – because some people will claim that they do work. Apparently, partly the reason is that rats are very intelligent and soon learn to avoid, or even tolerate those repellants after a short while.
With relation to hogs and sonic repellants. In reality I suspect no-one has ever been able to do any reliable scientific studies about whether they affect hogs. From my own experience, some years ago I tried leaving a kind of sonic rodent deterrant outside for a short time, only during daylight, thinking the hogs wouldn’t be around. It was really an indoor one, but I had it taped under a table so it didn’t get wet. But a hog turned up early one evening and I saw the hog visibly flinch when it went past the repeller. That was enough for me, it was immediately removed and I would not want to risk using one (or even cat/dog repellers) with hogs around. And we never know when a sick or injured hog might turn up during the day, needing help – so my feeling now is that I wouldn’t want to use them during the day either.
But if you feed the birds, I would suggest stopping that for a while as that is often what initially attracts the rats. But also one thing I tried, when I had a particularly persisitent rat, was scattering food (kitten biscuits), on the grass. The rat still tried, to start with, but it obviously took it much longer to eat all the food, so there was still some left for the hogs. Hogs are quite happy foraging. The rat eventually disappeared (probably shouldn’t say that – there’ll probably be one back tonight now!) but whether because it was too much like hard work or some other reason, I don’t know.
Good luck, I hope you manage to find some sort of solution.
