Rat Control

Summary: If you are unfortunate enough to find yourself with a rat in your midst, you will be searching for answers on how to catch it fast. Rodent glue boards may present their own problems.

Lots of people keep rats as pets, but feral rats are a whole other story. They roam your house leaving droppings where they please and nibbling on stored food that you only discover when you go to eat that food yourself. Yuck! You may also discover damaged furniture where the rat has been gnawing or where it has been tearing away at fabric and pillow stuffing for its nest. Not to mention the ever present fear of knowing you have a wild animal hiding in your living space.

So you rush to the store to buy rat-sized glue board rat traps. You put a couple of the boards out near the spot where you have found the rat droppings. So far, so good.

The next morning you find that the glue board has been moved and you even notice some rodent hair on the trap, but no rat. The rat has had a close encounter, but escaped. From then on your rat control efforts will result in zero rats caught.

First understand that those little store-brought rat glue boards are only good for mice and immature rats. The mature rats got that way because they are smart. If you know exactly where the rat is nesting you will need to create a border of glue boards that the rat is forced to cross. Therefore, your glue boards have to be about two feet wide.

The use of glue boards is becoming more and more controversial because many feel the trap is cruel to the animal and if the trap successfully catches a rat the death can be slow and tortuous. Most often glue traps fail to cat adult rats, so instead of glue traps we suggest the good old reliable rat snap trap. It's less expensive, cleaner and simply more effective.