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What should I do if I find a nest of rats in the attic?
If you find a nest of rats in the attic, we would highly recommend that you give the professionals in to
give you a hand. A nest of rats usually means a rat plus her babies, and these are animals that reproduce
at a staggering rate. The young also reach sexual maturity at just a few weeks of age too, often meaning
that one rat soon becomes two rats, then ten, then a hundred … It doesn't take long for the number to start
racking up.
Rats are incredibly adaptable creatures, but the attic tends to be one of the number one hot spots in residential
properties for the rodents to set up home. You should look at using snap traps if you are a novice, mostly because
they're much easier to use, and you don't really need to do anything complicated with the rats once you have trapped
them afterwards. Live cage traps come with many more disadvantages, and often leave you with the problem of a handful
of rats to deal with (at least) at the end of it.
Snap traps, although not the most humane approach (or so you would think), deals with the entire problem, slowly but surely.
Before you set them, you should first ensure that you have sealed up any holes or weak spots of your home that are leading the
rats in, in the first place, and after they have been set, you should be sure to check them regularly. But you will more than
likely kill the mother, and if the babies are not yet old enough to fend for themselves, they will also die of starvation. This
is why you should call in the professionals - every solution you find will often come with a handful of other problems right
after it.
If the rats are old enough to be free from their mother, however, you will soon find that they end up in your snap traps too.
Of course, the other approach you could take is to use the mother to find the babies, and then use the babies as bait in your live cage
traps. This option only really works if you know where the babies / best is in the first place. When the mother has left to go out hunting
for food (you will need to watch for a while to wait for this to happen), you could use thick gloves to capture the babies. Place these in
the baited trap, with food in there just to sweeten the deal, and you'll more than likely find that the mother wanders right in after her young,
desperately trying to keep them safe.
These are both quite dangerous approaches, and can go wrong if you don't really know what you are doing. Calling in the professionals ensures
that the entire job is done right, from start to finish - the home inspection, the repair work and sealing, the rat trapping, and then the cleanup
operation, which is often very long and very extensive.
For more rat information, visit our rat removal tips page, or for more specific how-to instructions, read the how to get rid of rats page with 6 step-by-step instructions.
If you have a problem with rats above your ceiling in your house, read my rats in the attic guide. The most important part of rat control is sealing shut entry holes into the building, but after
you've done that, you'll want to know how to kill rats humanely to complete the rat control job. If you need to hire professional help in your city, click on my directory of over
200 rat removal companies servicing 95% of the USA. we can help your with your rat problem!
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