How to kill a rat.

I'm going to say this again because it is a critical part of getting rid of the rats out of your house. The first thing you must do is to seal up all of the holes and entrances that the rats are using to get inside, if you don't do this then after you wipe out the current rat population more will just come, so failing to do this just means you'll get into a repetitive cycle. The objective of this exercise is to seal up all the entrances and exits the rats are using and then to go after the resident population that are left inside the house and there always will be rats left in the house, even if it is just juveniles. Now let's talk about methods of killing the rats that are left.

There are two main methods, the first and only real guaranteed way is to use lethal snap traps. These are the old-fashioned large wooden based traps with a piece of steel on a spring that snaps down on the rat when it touches the bait. These traps are considered one of the most humane ways to kill rats as they generally die within a couple of seconds, vets believe they mostly die of shock as well as from the injuries the trap inflicts. There are a myriad of choices to use as bait but most professionals use peanut butter smeared on the trap plate, it seems rats like peanut butter.

The second and most popular method of killing rats is using poisoned baits, only ever use commercially prepared ones as they have the correct dosage of poison to kill the animal. The downside of poisons is that they are neither fast nor gentle, any mammal that ingests poison is going to be a lot of pain soon after it eats it, rats are no exception, poisoned rats will display obvious signs of great pain and distress for hours before they die, and yes it can be hours before the animal will die because it depends on how much of the bait it actually ate. Of course if the animal fails to eat a lethal dose it will just get sick for a while and then recover. The downside of this with rats is their intelligence level allows them to remember not to eat that again.

There are a whole bunch of incredibly fanciful methods of killing rats, the most ludicrous of which I personally believe is that you have to trap the rat alive and then prepare what is basically a CO2 gas chamber to kill it.

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