In the summer a lot of people leave their trash sitting in bags until Thursday morning when they have the weekly pick-up; that means that if a cat catches a whiff of something and rips the bag open there's a good chance that a mouse, rat, squirrel or raccoon will start digging through the trash. Rats have never been a problem in this area; you would see one or two of them scavenging but it was never something that got out of control. When I did have a problem with rat lurking near the garbage cans I didn't want to use a glue trap because that's simply inhumane so I tried the Victor snap-trap that is suppose to be an instant-kill trap. When I baited them with peanut butter and left them at the edge of the yard I knew that I would have to check them every day; I didn't want a dead rat attracting flies and have it start the decomposition process in the middle of summer. While this wasn't a fruitful endeavor for the rat it did kill two rather fat looking mice. One of them was still twitching when I went to check the traps so it must have just been caught. It died about two minutes later and I disposed of the trap and the body in several plastic bags. I am not sure how this would do for well-fed fat rats; when I was applying the peanut butter I accidentally hit the spring trap and it snapped shut with such force that the trap popped up off the table a little. These were inexpensive compared to other rat traps but a couple of them seem poorly assembled. I still have a couple of them in the basement that I keep around in case I have any more problems with mice or rats but I won't use these in common areas of the house because I have free-roaming guinea pigs and ferrets. It think the ferrets are a little too slick get caught in one but I am almost certain that the guinea pigs would find the peanut butter way too much of a temptation.

AlexFortune

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