week 34: war on the rats

this week on the little dream farm

Aug 25, 2024

Last week it seemed like maybe we had a mouse issue in our chicken coop.

Turns out it’s a rat issue.

Turns out it’s actually a rat infestation.

This is a story I don’t love to have to tell, and it may not be one you’d like to read. I’m sharing it, though, in hopes that it helps someone else not to make the same mistakes we did where mice/rat control is concerned…especially if you live in the country, on land, on a farm, or dream of doing so one day…heck, this will even help you if you live in the city!

I’ve broken today’s Farm Note up into sections - the story about the rats, and then how we’re dealing with them.

There’s nothing after that second section, so for those of you who want to hear the story but not our ridding details, I’ll advise you when to stop reading. But for those of you who want to know or think the information may help you or someone you know, I’ve included it for educational purposes and to share what is working for us, since this seems to vary greatly for most people.

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And now onto the Farm Note…

There are two versions of us in order to help tell this story:

There’s “Past Us” and what little we knew about rats and mice before we had an infestation in our coop.

And there’s “Current Us” and everything we know now about rats and mice, how an infestation occurs, how to prevent it, common methods people use, and why we chose our current strategy.

Past Us

Past us noticed a few mice here and there in our milk house, barn, coop, and sometimes in the lower kitchen cabinets in the house.

No big deal, really, we thought…we live in the country on a farm, surrounded by farms, and there’s virtually no way to prevent the occasional field mouse. They’re tiny anyhow and mostly get hunted and don’t live very long, is what we’ve always thought.

In the 2.5 years we’ve lived here it was never an issue, so we never worried about it, but we’ve always taken these precautions anyhow:

In the House:
We keep food items like sugar, flour, rice, etc. in secure glass storage in our cabinets.
We leave all food items out of the lower cabinets in the kitchen.
We frequently vacuum and clean the kitchen cabinets and check them for any activity.
We went around and added steel wool to any gaps we found.
Having seven cats in the house seems to keep them away…in all the time we’ve lived here Buist is the only one to have ever caught a tiny mouse in the house.
Black Kitty gets several mice a day outside around the house.

In the Milk House, Barn, and Chicken Coop:
We keep all donkey and chicken food in steel trash cans with secure lids.
We frequently clean the spaces.
We converted a lot of what we store outside into these storage containers to prevent mice from entering or chewing on boxes and our things.

Current Us

We were going about farm and country life this way until a few months ago we noticed holes in the concrete floors in the coop. So we got some concrete mix and got after patching up all the holes. We figured the barn floors are just really, really old.

Then a few weeks ago we noticed a pretty big mouse here and there. We didn’t think much of it since we never had any issues. We’ve also had birds, possums, groundhogs, and the occasional stray cat in our barns, too.

Then we noticed we were getting fewer eggs from the hens.

Then Chris started noticing he was buying bags of chicken feed more often than normal, and we started to think there was something more than just the birds who get into the coop eating their food.

And then two weeks ago happened.

Obviously this was all going on over the last few months, but it wasn’t until two weeks ago while I was out of town that Chris started to see a lot of big mice running around the coop.

Then I got home and on Tuesday I went into the coop during the late morning and it was like this:

We clearly had a problem…and not just a mouse problem, but a rat problem.

What’s the difference, you ask? Well, let me share with you why rats are known to be worse than mice.

For starters, they carry more diseases than mice. They also reproduce in greater numbers and more frequently, they’re more aggressive than mice, and they’re very smart which makes them harder to catch or kill. Rats also tunnel underground and can even tunnel their way through concrete. Their teeth are also always growing so they need to chew hard things (like wood) in order to keep their teeth shaved…contributing to our greatest fear: fire hazard.

Additionally, rats also eat chickens. Yes, you read that right. They also eat their eggs. Rats are most active at night and known to sneak into a coop and gnaw away at a chicken from their behind while they’re roosting at night. Because chickens can’t see in the dark, they tend not to know what is happening until it’s too late. I learned this in a chicken Facebook group many months ago when a woman was trying to seek help with what might have been attacking her hens. The consensus from the long-time chicken owners and farmers? Rats.

Thankfully our roosting bars are very high off the ground, which is why we think the hens have been safe from this…but it definitely started to worry us at the beginning of the week.

I think it probably helps to do some public Rat Math for you as well, to understand how we got here…because certainly we didn’t know this before now:

Rat Math:

Rats have an average of 4-6 litters per year—each litter typically 6-12 pups.
A female rat can produce ~60 pups per year.
Rats reach reproductive maturity at 3 months and can become pregnant again within hours of giving birth.
Rat breeding is most active in spring and fall.
Rats can live up to 18 months but tend to die within 1 year in the wild.

Thinking back over the last few months is now easy to see how we got here—the signs were all pretty clear in hindsight, but as has been the case for us with almost everything new in our farm life journey, we didn’t know what we didn’t know, and we’ve mostly learned things the hard way from stuff going wrong and us learning how to make it right.

So…I spent Tuesday and Wednesday doing research, making an appointment with a local exterminator for an inspection, and reading every blog and watching every farm and homestead video I could find about how to get rid of rats in a barn…a much harder thing to tackle because barns are inherently full of holes and easy places for them to get in and make nests.

These rats happened to be making nests underneath the barn and tunneling up though the concrete and living in the walls of the coop.

Now…you might be thinking, Why not just send all seven cats out to the barn to take care of it or bring in feral cats as barn cats?

Five of our seven cats are domesticated house cats and we highly doubt they’d have any clue how to take on a rat infestation—plus we’d never stick them in a barn with possibly aggressive rats with potential diseases.

As far as barn cats are concerned, we’ve elected not to go that route because we don’t want to upset the balance of Black Kitty being able to enjoy being outside on the farm and the potential of the other cats not getting along with her.

So neither of those are good options.

Many people will say it’s more humane to catch mice alive and then drive them more than 5 miles away (because they’re really good at finding their way back to their nests) to get rid of them. But trapping them and releasing them (mind you there are likely more than 100-200 rats by this point) is not an option because all that would do is displace the problem onto our neighbors…something we’d never, ever do.

When the pest control guy came on Thursday I was actually surprised at how cheap the quote was: $200 to install several bait boxes in and around the structures and $75 a month to maintain them.

The thing I was most concerned about is the kind of poison they use. I asked the very kind man (who was cooing at our hens in the most adorable high-pitched voice when I came out to greet him) about the name of the poison they use so I could research it on my own.

“Bromadiolone” is what it’s called, he said, “The guys at work tell new technicians they can remember it by thinking, ‘Bro…imma die alone.’”

Real nice.

When you set bait boxes the rats/mice go in (but they’re generally locked so that dogs and cats can’t get in them) they eat the bait, and then it generally takes about 24-36 hours for them to die…so many of them would just die in the coop and in the yard all over the farm.

Modern rodent poison is known as anticoagulant rodenticide. Essentially, it depletes the vitamin K in the rat and they bleed to death. Not a pretty way to die.

All of the poison product companies will tell you that “secondhand poisoning is unlikely” and that your cat or dog would have to ingest a lot of dead poisoned rats or mice for the toxicity levels to affect them.

But all you have to do is spend 20 minutes Googling secondhand poisoning from rodenticides to learn that owls, hawks, foxes, chickens, coyotes, dogs, and cats are often poisoned and sometimes killed from secondhand rodenticide poisoning.

Even if your cat or dog doesn’t die in the first few hours, depending on the level of poisoning, they may require a complete blood transfusion, a weeklong stay in the hospital, and an ongoing regimen of vitamin K1 injections in order to restore their levels. This generally happens to dogs or cats who somehow break into bait boxes because the poison is fish scented so that rodents are attracted to it, which makes dogs and cats (and chickens) attracted to it, too.

I called a trusted friend and mentor who lives up in Vermont, as she and her husband lived on a farm years ago and live in the country still today.

She told me that, sadly, they had two cats die from rat poison after going that route.

So we had our answer…no poison on the farm. We couldn’t bear to put the hens and Black Kitty at risk like that.

And so we were going to need another plan.

PAUSE HERE!

If you don’t want to read about how we’re getting rid of the rats, this is the spot where you’ll want to sign off for today and as always, we can’t thank you enough for reading the Farm Note and for catching up with us each week! We love ya! Wish us luck!

Now…for those of you who’d like to know how to tackle a rat problem…or at least what is working for us…read on:

Our goal to tackle the war on the rats is to eliminate them all as quickly as possible by whatever means necessary that doesn’t include poison.

We don’t even like killing bugs in our house…we always catch them and let them out, so this part really sucks for us.

After doing a lot of research and watching a bunch of videos of farmers and homesteaders talk about what worked on their farm, we decided on the three methods we could (mostly) handle…I’ll briefly walk you through each, as all of them have worked:

Snap Traps: we bought 8 large rat snap traps and set them along the walls in the coop and in the mini coop next to it and closed the doors so the hens couldn’t go in during the day. At the recommendation of our friend in Vermont, we baited the traps with Fancy Feast wet cat food. In the first 24 hours we got 28 rats with this method. I had to go out to the coop every 30 minutes to keep re-setting the traps because that’s how well it’s working.

A mixture of baking soda and corn muffin mix: Did you know that rats and mice can’t burp or pass gas? Because of this, an equal part mixture of baking soda and corn muffin mix placed in plastic Tupperware containers with a lid on top and a hole cut into the side of the container has been our second most helpful method. The baking soda reacts with the acid in their stomach and kills them. It’s not a quick death, but it’s very effective in the barn. You wouldn’t want to use this method in your home because they generally go back to their nest and die in the nest or in the walls which would leave a terrible smell behind for you. For us, in the barn, we’re not worried about that because we don’t live in that space and our goal is to get rid of them as fast as we can. This is also not harmful to other animals and will not cause secondhand poisoning. The lids on the containers keep the chickens and any birds from getting into them or the rats spilling them everywhere.

Dunk Buckets: This drowning method feels horrible and it has really affected me emotionally, but it’s effective. There are lots of different methods for setting up bucket traps with a lid that has bait on it and essentially dunks the rat into the bucket. The problem with adult rats, like we have in the coop, is that they can jump out of five gallon buckets if you just bait it and don’t put water in the bucket (and as we mentioned, we’re not releasing them onto our neighbors/community). We ordered a few of these lids that would work better if we were dealing with small mice because they aren’t as effective for bigger rats, but it has still worked. The best version of this, we’ve found, is a large steel trashcan with some wire mesh over the top and a solo cup, with the bottom cut out and fastened upside down with duct tape, to the middle of the wire mesh in the center of the trashcan. You need about a foot of water in the bottom of the can and some kind of ledge inside the trash can with food to attract them to it. This method has been the most effective of the dunk-style bucket-style traps.

Going Forward

As of Sunday morning, we’ve eliminated more than 50 juvenile and adult rats.

We think that in a week or two we’ll have mostly gotten after the problem, and in a month or two it will likely be mostly solved.

For the time being we’re completely removing food and water from inside the coop - we’re feeding and watering the hens outside during the day in increments rather than leaving food out, so the rats won’t have on ongoing food source in the coop from now on.

We’ll wait to patch all the holes in the floor until we’re mostly rid of them, as we don’t want them to just take off up to our house or the Big Barn and create problems there, too.

Going forward, we’ll keep the stations of fresh baking soda and corn muffin mixture in all of our structures at all times to continue killing off the occasional rat or mouse.

As they say - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Now that we’ve learned how to deal with rats and mice the hard way, we’ll remain more focused on prevention. Now we have the tools to never find ourselves in this position again and hopefully it helps you or someone you share it with, too!

This certainly isn’t the type of Farm Note I like to write, but if you learn something from it or it helps someone else, well then we’re more than happy to pass on what we’ve learned.

As always, if you’ve got experience dealing with mice or rats, helpful methods we didn’t mention here, or want to share a story, please feel free to do so…we always love hearing from YOU!