The Case for Leaving City Rats Alone (2016)
nautil.us
nautil.us
My neighbor leaves their vehicle hoods open while on their rafting trips... he also uses live traps to catch and relocate the rats around his house. Otherwise pack rats will set up a nest in vehicles' engine area, destroying the wires and filling it with twigs and food.
An Arizona company [1] came up with a sort of poison that only targets rodents' reproductive organs: "ContraPest contains the ovotoxic chemical 4-vinylcyclohexene diepoxide (VCD), which is a known killer of oocytes in immature ovarian follicles. The rat version of ContraPest also contains triptolide, which the company reports has adverse reproductive effects on both males and females. The product has been successfully used to sterilize both male and female mice, rats, and dogs." [2]
As "Mr. Pack Rat" explains, it's better to understand the pack rat than to indiscriminately poison them, as rodent predators fall victim to secondary poisoning with standard city-rat poisons, which makes pack rat problem worse [3].
[0] https://www.mrpackrat.net/packrats.html#six
They also gloss over the disease vector aspect of picking up bacteria from pets. People aren't giving up pets, but we will decide to get rid of rats.
I applaud the study for learning more about the rats and their qualities. Now, go eradicate them.
Knowing that the partial killing of a rat "family" potentially increases the diversity and potency of bacteria seems like very useful information in a world where we can't easily kill all rats.
Even then, they don’t necessarily do any harm. As long as the interior of the home is sealed, they can’t get in. Our building definitely has rats, and we saw one in our home shortly after we rented it. The previous tenants had just trapped rats they saw, but we insisted that the landlord send someone to seal every ingress point (with copper wool and silicone gel). Since then we haven’t had an issue, even though our little visitor would come daily before.
As a bonus, the same way rats get in, so do cockroaches. In NYC, older buildings, especially near the ground floor, are notorious for cockroach infestations. But we don’t have any of those in our unit either, despite the building being a century old. Turns out cockroaches and rats aren’t made of magic. They can’t teleport through solid material. If the interior of your home is sealed, they cannot get in.
Bold statement, You know that rats can chew through cement and pretty much anything else?
There’s also a question of how thick the material, and how motivated the rat. Can rats make a dent in bricks? Yes. Is a single rat going to chew a hole all the way through a brick wall just to see that’s on the other side? I’m no rodent behavior expert, but I doubt it.
More to the point (at least according to YouTube exterminators) rats will only chew through things if they have a reason to. That is why you seal holes with silicone caulk after the copper wool: to prevent the smell of food from drawing rats in.
In any case, I can only tell you what treatment we applied and what the results were. There is a lot of information on the internet about how to prevent rat ingress in apartments and buildings. Based on my experience, that information seems accurate. But another approach is to assume nothing can be done and live with periodic rat infestations.
Rats can definitely squeeze into very small spaces. However, they cannot squeeze through packed copper wool impregnated with silicone caulk.
My house however lacks rats. We've had an ongoing competition between the two cats. They're pretty evenly matched at this point for rats and mice caught.
Roaches have more entry points since they can fly and scale vertical walls.
They are basically everywhere people are. Friend has a house in a Suburban neighborhood. Along one side of his property is a long dense hedge. It's a rat superhighway.