Rats!

... and the birth control solution

Photo by fr0ggy5 on Unsplash

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First, I don't believe in killing any living thing. Not people, not animals, not insects, not reptiles, nor creatures who live in water. Not even if they kill humans. And especially not if they are merely inconvenient to humans (like mosquitos, ants, spiders, mice, and -- yes -- rats).

Second, when I was growing up cats handled any mouse problem, black snakes patrolled the barn and kept the rat population down. We had chickens for egg laying. Mom didn't have the heart to kill them. Dad hunted and brought home rabbits and squirrels. I stopped eating them at age five when I realized the animals on the plate were the same as the ones I saw outside.

I never killed ants because as a child I would lie on the grass and watch them going back and forth from their anthill. I couldn't help imagining their lives and wondering where I fit in as a giant (to them) human.

It's long been my practice to catch and release spiders if I see one in the house. Flies will go back outside if I hold the door open for them. I keep mosquitoes away with repellent. I try not to attract yellow jackets because I don't kill bees or wasps of any kind.

I didn't stop eating chicken, or fish, or meat from the store until I was a grown woman. I did stop in 1970, with occasional relapses from my vegetarianism in the 90s. But I stopped altogether when a herd of cows begged me to save their lives. I had stopped to photograph an old barn. They came running to me, bawling. I understood they wanted out. But what could I do? I drove away. When I came back a few days later, having been haunted by their cries, they were gone. They'd been taken to market for slaughtering.

A few years after that incident, I was living with my daughter when I discovered there was a rat problem. I found humane rat control. A man and his son came and set no-kill traps. They sealed up entry points, and came back repeatedly until every rat had been trapped and taken to their place in the countryside and set free.

Many years later we bought this place together. We decided we wanted to have hens. Three hens per household are allowed here. Roosters not so much unless your neighbors are tolerant of this living alarm clock. So when one of our "hens" grew up to be a rooster, we re-homed them with their life partner. Winnie and Esther went to live in the country. We drove them their ourselves. (We actually had five chickens. We had brought home four tiny chickens, one of who desperately wanted its mom. So we also bought a pullet who was a great little mama to all the smaller ones. She was Esther, and Winnie was the desperate baby. They loved each other.)

But when we decided to get chickens, we were woefully ignorant of one thing: having chickens means having rats. Rats will find food if there's food to be found. We don't leave our hens penned up on a concrete slab, so the rats dugs into the chicken run and found their food. When we decided we would only feed the hens out in the front yard where we could see them, we were treated with the sight of our hens sharing their meals with rats.

I hired new rat people when I could find the men we had used years earlier. They came out, blocked up rat entries, filled the holes with foam, and suggested we dig around the entire house and lay down hardware cloth, and three inches of gravel. We didn't do that right away because of the HUGE cost. But later, I did hire Rent-a-Butch to come out and do that around the front of the house. (Sides were fine, the back is where the chicken run and coop are.)

That's when I learned what great diggers rats are. Hardware cloth? Ha! It means nothing to them. They can chew through it. And the copper mesh I put down which was guaranteed to be rat proof? Again, Ha.

By now I was desperate. Hens were supposed to attack rats and run them off. Ours pulled up extra seating. I looked into birth control for rats because it was something I'd read about. When I first read about it, you could only get it from the people who came out and put it out. Literally hundreds of dollars per month.

This time, I found the name of the product, and learned it was now for sale over the counter. Hooray! I bought some. Very expensive. You have to put two to six pellets at each rat hole, every single day unless and until the rats stop eating it (presumably having either died or moved away). It takes four to six weeks to begin working, which of course means babies are being born meanwhile.

One pair of rats can produce up to 1,250 rats in a year. They become able to bear babies at nine weeks. 1,250 grows exponentially. How many you have depends on resources for food, water, shelter. But more than a few -- who are living in the wild, not under my house -- is unbearable.

I have nothing against them personally, I just don't want them having parties, fights, babies, or even conversations under my house.

I simply cannot afford the cost of the birth control product (it's called Evolve if you want to research it). So I went to the manufacturer's website and looked up ingredients. Then I researched to see which of the ingredients was providing birth control. Next I figured out proportions of ingredients. Then I created a recipe and ordered the supplies.

I bake birth control bars. They resemble oat bar cookies. They smell terrible when they're baking. And because they mold after about five days, and we don't have a big freezer to keep a supply, I bake "rat bars" every four days.

I put a bar into each of the four rat holes around the outside of our house (one in back, three in front). The rats are waiting. I know this because I put down the bar and if I turn my back for a minute it has disappeared.

I don't know if it's working for sure, but we see fewer rats. We also no longer hear rats fighting. They seem to have their bars and then sleep for several hours. The chickens' food doesn't suddenly disappear. The hens have food left over at the end of the day, and the rats don't touch it.

There you have it. I wrote this at the request of two of my readers. If any of you want or need my recipe, just tell me in the comments, or message me your email address and I will send it.

Have you ever had a problem with rats or other "pests?" If you have non-killing ways of dealing with them, I'd love to hear about it.