Ok, so more like NO rats!
When you have livestock, you will eventually have rodents, especially if you live in the woods. We keep our grain & other feeds in rodent resistant cans and keep trash picked up, but we still get visitors. They like to head into the barn and the wood pile in fall. We have a few “welcome gifts” waiting for them.
We are very careful with rat bait, as one of our dogs thinks it’s a snack. I also worry that the rodents will drag it into the hay stack and the goats will accidentally eat it. We use Just One Bite bait bars. First, because it is closest to what the rodents would find to eat in the barn. Second, and most important, it is safer for the rest of the animals. The big bar can be broken into smaller chunks, and it has a hole through the bar. We use pieces of old electric fence wire to secure the bait to the underside of the hay pallets. The rats have to eat the bait where it is and can’t drag it off to a nest someplace. I have also flagged the wire placements with the ends of the Tyvek kid neckbands. This helps at the start of the hay season to re-bait the pallets.
The Anatolian will also hunt the rats and mice. She is a little messier at it. She has been known to topple hay stacks in pursuit of the blasted things. We are also adding a cat back into the vermin control program. He will have to wait until mid-August to get started though. I want him neutered before he’s out roaming the farm. We are getting him trained on the fuzzy catnip mice in the meantime.
We also have snap traps for outside where the dogs won’t get caught trying to lick the peanut butter. The big plastic TomCat traps have been really reliable and easy to set. We did learn we need to tie them to a post or something. In some cases, the rat tries to run after being caught. The trap gets wedged in the woodpile or under a pallet. It’s a lot easier to just pull it back out on the end of the tether than go in after it!
I seriously doubt that we will ever entirely get rid of the rats, since they like to emigrate from the swap across the street, but we are at least keeping the numbers in check.