Humane rat trap or alternative suggestions
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We have spotted a rat in our garden a few times recently and today it was crawling under our shed. We do put food out for the birds and now and again put some food down for hedgehogs at a time where the weather makes you think they might take a break from hibernation.
Seems to me we have choices to either to ignore and carry on putting food down, not put food out for a while or to try and catch the rat(s) with a humane trap and then release it some distance away from us.
I would be worried about putting a humane rat trap down in case it catches other wildlife (especially grey squirrels who are in our garden from time to time) and how safe it would be for the animal but I would welcome comments from anyone who had experience of using these or could recommend one.
If we went down the road of not putting food down I wonder if someone can say how long it would take for the rat(s) to move elsewhere and whether they would still try now and again to come back so advice on how long to not feed for them to go away would be appreciated.
I really would like to have the hedgehogs back next year as well as having birds in our garden (some have nested in bird box and probably the conifers) so I would be really grateful if someone can give me good advice on what I should be doing to go rat free but not to have lost the other wildlife in the process.
Hi Richard123
Sorry no-one has replied sooner. If you still have a rat problem, I would go down the route of stopping food for a while – or at least use a large tray for any bird food so that none reaches the ground. Although some rats are exceptionally good climbers and find ways round that. How long to stop food is difficult to say as some rats are much more persistent than others. It’s really trial and error.
But humane rat traps have been known to catch hogs as well, so like you I would be worried about using one.
It’s a really tricky problem, not least because rats vary quite a bit. Some people report them not liking objects being in different places, but the rats that have been round here in the past haven’t seem to take any notice of that sort of thing and have been quite bold.
This is a link to an old topic re. rats which has some links to some other ‘rat’ topics. They’re a bit old now, but you might find something useful there.
https://www.hedgehogstreet.org/forums/topic/rat-probelm/Good luck. Let us know if anything works there.
The hedgehog who adopted my garden last year was a keen eater. About an hour after sunset, there was the regular journey from the house to the feed hut for breakfast, and then off on the nightly wandering. Some hibernation in January and then a move out in February meant that there was uneaten food in the feed hut – so the rats turned up. By the start of March it was clear something had to be done!
Plan A. Rats are reported to be neophobic so I moved the feed hut from its usual spot in a shrub border to the middle of the open grass (about 5 m). After the relocation, the rats were baffled on the first night, had explored to half way on the second night, and, by the third night, were around, in, and all over the feed hut (even though it contained no food). I then moved the feed hut 2 m west, still in the open, but the rats found it that night.
And so to Plan B. Rats are reported to dislike certain smells. Internet searches and chats with garden centre staff suggested various scented substances which might deter rats. Do check the safety data sheet for products before using them! I decided to use Flash liquid floor cleaner which has a strong citronella scent. Each evening I spray a diluted solution (15% cleaner, 85% water) along the section of chain-link fence the rats used as their entrance. I don’t use much (maybe 50 ml of the dilute solution) because the scent is quite strong!
I check the footage from the garden infrared camera each morning and since I started spraying a week ago I’ve only seen one rat for a few seconds. So far, so good.
Thankfully, the hedgehog highway is on the south side of the garden so spraying the chain-link fence on the north side does not seem to have caused an issue – at least one hedgehog is now roaming the garden and visiting the feed hut every night.
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