There are rats in my garage.

Baby ones, but they're like 5 inches large. Does anyone know of a trap that can trap/maim/kill them without making a big mess and scaring them from never taking the bait again and is affordable?

The friendly, local, neighborhood humane society might have a free cat or two...

you need 2 cats to handle all those rats. They seem to be big rats.

http://www.pestproducts.com/rodent_traps.htm

I prefer good, old-fashioned, spring type rat traps though...

http://www.victorpest.com/mouse_snap_traps.htm

Oh and if you have food or trash in your garage or it's just cluttered, clean it up first.

JM-99

Problem - 3 dogs (Two that can kill a cat)
But really, does anyone know any nice traps that work effectively?

Navck said:

Problem - 3 dogs (Two that can kill a cat)
But really, does anyone know any nice traps that work effectively?

Click to expand...

can you put the dogs on leash in the basement at night to allow the cats to do their work. You have to set up a shift time table for these guys. you got to pay time for overtime too. :laughing:

Can you regularly see them? A good air rifle will do a number on rats.

Google T Rex Rat Traps. I used to use the old Victor spring traps but they were always a pain in the *ss to set and put down. The T Rex traps are reusable and _way_ easier to set. I never worry about losing a finger with these. Just make sure you tie them to something as _big_ rats can get an amazing distance away before they die or get stuck. Setting your own traps makes lots of sense, especially since local pest control here will charge 50-75 bucks per rat.

Take a look at this page for ideas... some good ideas in the comments too. http://glass.typepad.com/journal/2005/09/how_to_catch_a_.html

One word "Warfarin"

what ever you do... DO SOMETHING!

don't let this go, or you will have rats running all over your house. chewing wiring in walls etc. take action NOW!

pest pro's use plain rat traps, lot of em....
rat poison works great, but watch out for your dogs getting into rat poison. it's best to place without opening up package near known activity. let the rats eat into packaging. too easy and they will not eat the bait.

Could give this a try- though I don't think this would be good if your dogs are free to roam around in the area..

Big Snap-E Rat Trap

reminds me of http://rat-hunter.com/

Mix D-con with peanut butter and spread the stuff on cardboard and put it in and around your garage. They will probably eat the cardboard and all. Rats should start dying off soon after.

Snap traps are good but won't get them all. A combination of food poisoning and mechanical traps should work well. Good luck.

Dave

subsonic 22 rounds, they don't have any power, only the primer to propell

It's way too late for cats.

Rule of thumb #1: Rats won't usually move into a building occupied by cats.

Rule of thumb #2: Cats won't be able to clear a building already occupied by rats.

I'd start with Warfarin, as already mentioned. Usually if that doesn't work it's because the user is clueless. I wish I had five bucks for everytime I've heard someone say that they quit the Warfarin because the rats just ate it and nothing happened. Geeze. Be sure to read the instructions. That goes for anything else you try, too. With rats, anything you try casually will probably fail. Whether it's poison or any kind of traps, you need to know as much about your adversary as possible.

Too bad Jack Crow hasn't been around for a while. He used to write about his Jack Russell Terriers. I use a cat to keep the rats from moving in but multiple Jack Russell Terriers, oooow, that's the 'A' ticket.

NickelPlate said:

Mix D-con with peanut butter and spread the stuff on cardboard and put it in and around your garage. They will probably eat the cardboard and all. Rats should start dying off soon after.

Snap traps are good but won't get them all. A combination of food poisoning and mechanical traps should work well. Good luck.

Dave

Click to expand...

I would not recommend the peanut butter + rat poisoning since he has three dogs.

JM-99

Can't use guns, but thanks for the advice everyone.

uhm...try a pet python...

I used big traps. We lived in a middle income neighborhood and had just planted a little garden. We noticed the little plants were getting eaten down to the surface of the ground. We set traps and caught 8 or 10 rats. Our dog caught 6 or 8 more, and I killed another 8 or so with a pellet gun.

One night about 10 I was going outside to check on the dog but unknown to me at that time the dog had a rat cornered against the back door. When I opened the door and walked out, the rat came inside. I heard my wife screaming so I went back inside to check. We tried to shoo the rat back outside be he remembered the dog and wasn't about to go back outside, so he turned and ran to the other end of our house. My wife said we were not going to bed until we got the rat outside so I started searching. I finally found the rat under the living room sofa, then he ran into the bathroom and ultimately jumped into the bathtub. I closed the sliding doors and stood on the toilet seat to look over the sliding doors. The rat climbed the hose on our shower and jumped on my shoulder. I knocked him off but a little later he ran up my leg. I finally killed him with a pellet gun. This whole time my wife was on the phone with our neghbor giving a play by play commentary. Anyway this pretty much ended our rat problems.

A year later my wife suggested that she wanted to be single again and I should find a new residence, which I did. A month later she called and told me she had a rat living in her garage. I told her to set a trap before the rat decided to chew on wiring. One night she called me, in tears because she had trapped the rat but couldn't kill it. She wanted me to come over with my pellet gun and kill the rat. Now this pellet gun is a single pump Daisy, made for target practice. It is big and menacing looking and even though it doesn't have much power it is enough to kill a rat. So I come zipping late at night and go into the house carrying this big menacing looking gun. Five minutes later I come back out with this big gun, get in my car and drive off. If any of the neighbors had seen that I'm sure they would have been very suspicious.

A few years later I'm in my new house in an upper class part of town, and a rat decides to live in my garage. He ignored my traps for a long time, so I decided to get serious about this. My mistake was keeping my dogfood in the garage during this same time. I decided if I put the dogfood in the house then the rat might be more interested in the traps. I picked up a medium size bag of dogfood that I had not opened yet and discovered that it was now only half full. With the dogfood out of the way I caught the rat pretty quickly. This was the biggest one I had seen- the body measured 7 inches long and the tail measured 9 inches long. That was over 10 years ago and I haven't seen a rat since.

Anyway, the spring traps worked well for me. Peanut butter is a good bait because it can't be removed from the trap easily. I always played with the traps a bit so they were fairly sensitive, and if I was careful I didn't have any problems with catching my own fingers. Also when I was setting them by my garden I found that I had to tie them to something with a piece of wire so they didn't get drug off.