Rats can quickly be a problem in your own yard and home if you have an infestation. When you experience a rat problem, it is a matter of understanding the problem to remove the problem and clean up any remaining rat population with the help of pest control professionals and treatments. Here are some important elements to rat extermination in your home and outside in your yard.
Clean Up the Area
Once you have determined the type of rat infestation in your yard or within your home, you need to take steps to clean up your property to eliminate places of shelter and food and water sources for rats, as this is what can allow them to thrive on your property. Clean up excess dead vegetation or compost piles to remove any potential shelter for rats.
If you keep any woodpiles around your property, or any type of wood refuse or lumber materials for storage in your yard, it is essential that you remove them or, if this is not possible, to raise them off the ground. For example, if you have a woodpile for your wood-burning fireplace, you will want to keep the woodpile, but you should store it up off the ground on shelves or metal supports to raise it off the ground one to two feet.
Take a look at any food sources from a bird feeder in your yard. Any waste that falls to the ground from an elevated hanging bird feeder becomes an immediate food source that will attract rats. And if your dog or cat has their food stored or placed outside, be sure it is stored in a sealed container, and do not leave their food and water dishes outside at night.
Trash around your garbage bin can attract rats and provide them a food source, so seal up your trash bin with a lid or other sealed container. Don't ever place bagged trash on the ground outside, because a rat can easily chew a hole through the bag and get to it.
Place Baits and Traps
After you have reduced and removed the food and shelter sources in your yard, you can focus on eliminating the rat population. There are many types of successful products you can use to trap or kill rats, depending on if you have pets or children in the area that you want to keep safe.
Rat baits are also available, which place the bait inside a container where only the rat can access, which makes it safe, but you can also hire a professional pest control service to manage the extermination. This can be beneficial if you are using traps and need your pest control professional to follow up with trap clean-up.
After struggling for quite some time with pests inside of our home, I knew it had to stop. I was tired of going to bed everyday without knowing if the issue would be getting resolved, so I started investigating the matter. I realized that we had ants and spiders, so I spoked with a pest control professional about helping out. They were absolutely incredible to work with, and within a few weeks, the mess was sorted out. On this website, I began focusing on how to make things right, since you really never know which kinds of pests will impact your home.