Rat Repellent

Someone asked me if I knew a good way that they could get rid of the rats, and other vermin, in their attic. I've had rats myself and found that it is really not a big problem, certainly not generally worth paying a professional for.

As with any problem there are two aspects of the solution; prevention and cure. The cure for an ongoing rat problem is to get the rats out of your house. The prevention is to stop the rats from returning at some point in the future.

I've tried numerous cures, sonic, traps, and poison. The sonic device had no effect and the rats seemed quite able to ignore it. The traps caught a rat once, however, I didn't find the rat until it had become infested with maggots and then we had a fly problem for a week or so. The best cure, in my opinion, is to use poison.

The effect of most rat poisons is that the rats eat the poison and subsequently die later while they are outside your house. I have never, that I know of, had a rat die in my house as a result of my putting out poison. The poison which I tend to use is dcon, it's avalable in most hardware stores and it's both cheap and effective.

Once the cure has been administered you need to decide if you want to attempt to prevent rats from returning. Rats may or may not return to your house at some point in the future, so deciding to take preventative measures is going to depend upon your personal situation. A preventative measure which holds promise, although I have never used it myself, is the use of the scent of rats' predators in and around your house. If you don't already have cats and/or dogs in close proximity to your house you may want to try a dehydrated urine pellet repellent like "Shake Away". I've seen it for sale in numerous places including amazon.com.

Do you have a rat problem?

Good luck with any rat problems that you may have, if you have any comments please let me know and if you have any other questions which you'd like me to answer for free please send them to Ben Dash at ben.dash@gmail.com