HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO GET RID OF RATS?

Rat removal is one of those things that seems very simple in the beginning, but turns out to be more complicated than expected. If done correctly, rat control is composed of two separate but interdependent activities which are: sealing the exterior of the home to exclude future rat invasions and trapping the rats that are already in the home.

Sealing the home usually doesn’t take very long. The amount of time needed to seal rats out of a home depends on the condition and structure of the home. Sometimes a contractor has failed to seal a gap in a foundation wall where a pipe passes through and rats are finding their way through this single opening. This is a simple fix and will require only a few minutes to repair.

On the other end of the scale, things can be much worse. Situations that include multiple entrances, rotted wood, second story entry points, substandard foundation vents, etc. complicate situations and will obviously take longer to repair. On the average though, most homes take between a half day and a day to seal up.

Second, after the home is sealed the rats can be trapped and eliminated. To be successful both the exclusion and trapping have to be very thorough and remove all the rats and possible entrances. Of these two, trapping all the rats is the most challenging and can require many, many more visits and effort than the exclusion work.

Sometimes there are small populations of rats and you can be lucky and kill all the rats quickly and finish things up in just a couple of trap sets. Please note that “lucky” would be the key word in that last sentence. It usually doesn’t go that way, especially in situations where there are larger populations and/or the customer has already taken a crack at controlling their own rat problem.

Situations in which there are larger populations, the rats seem to be less cautions. Competition for food, an abundance of unexperienced rats, and many foolish juvenile rats, etc. make trapping more productive. A single trap set can have rats in every trap. However, toward the end of the trapping, project things are totally different.

You can go days and days and have nothing in the traps, but have still see signs of activity if you know what you are looking for. This is because at this point you are dealing with experienced rats, rats who have learned from near misses in traps, been close by when a fellow rat was killed, identified your scent on equipment, etc. This is where the novice may fail. Rats are harder to detect at this point. They do not make noise like they used to so you can’t count completely on sound to confirm project success.

It takes an experienced expert to reliably spot fresh rat sign. Lack of monitoring experience and skills will give a false sense of security and trapping is terminated only to see a population rebound. This is especially likely if available food sources were not secured and exclusion was less than 100%. This is when poor early trapping procedures and the high IQ of rats become apparent. Someone without experience may never get rid of all the rats. A change in trapping procedures will probably be required or you will need to call a skilled professional. At the Wildlife Company we have a different trap set design that we have developed just for this situation. We have been through this and we know what to do.