Rat Catcher

The Moose was perusing the World Wide Web a few weeks back, looking at safe options for catching and eliminating rats.  If you have chickens, or farm animals for that matter, and you feed them, you’ll have rats.  They come hand in hand and sometimes if not monitored can become overwhelming, threatening your chickens and you with disease.

We found several options, but this option has proven the best so far.

What you need;

5 gallon water bucket(s) with 3-4 inches of water in the bottom

Dry oatmeal

Wood slats, or in our case, part of a wood pallet

Ramp leading up to the top of the bucket(s)

The idea is to place the 3-4 inches of water in the bucket, place the wood or in our case, part of a pallet across the top of the buckets, a thin piece of wood or whatever you have laying around that can become a ramp and drop in a couple of handfuls of dry oatmeal.  Don’t panic, it will sink to the bottom, and eventually it creates foggy looking water and some oatmeal floats back to the top.  This may take a day or so to happen.  The rat gets up onto the wooden slats/pallet, looks down and thinks he sees a bucket full of tasty oatmeal.  Jumps in for what ends up as a swim, and can’t keep up for long.  You are now minus one disgusting, prolific breeding rodent.

It’s gross finding one floating in there, but no poison is used, the oatmeal will not harm your chickens or other animals and no dangerous metal traps to snap you or your animals. The wood pallet in our case also creates a seating area for the chickens, which they cannot fall through.  We’ve had this system in our chicken run, and we find about one rat each week that will no longer be an issue at The Compound. 

Dealing with rodents is a never ending issue, but this has really worked for us, costs very little if anything and has proven itself effective.