WIBU to tell my neighbours what to do with their garden?

Pest control are a waste of time- make your own rat boxes and use : Powdered Soup, Plaster of Paris mixed up with sugar and put in the box out of reach of birds and domestic pets.

Oh that's hilarious! Did you manage to correct her and how did she take it?

We had rats in our garden a few years ago and they were climbing the pergola to eat the nuts and fat balls in the bird feeders hung up there! In the morning, all the bird feeders would be scattered on the ground after they’d invaded them.

You have to report the problem to the council

Neighbours across the road had this trouble. Spoke to their NDN and asked her to stop feeding the birds for a bit because of the rats. Her response? "Oh I'm not feeding the birds. I'm feeding the gerbils living under the shed." She would not believe it was rats not gerbils....

“I want to tell them to stop putting all the food out but I guess legally it's their property to do what they like.”

Regardless of whether or not it’s their property they don’t get to do what they like when it’s causing a health hazard to others. If you think they’d be open to the discussion/will stop, tell them it’s causing rats. If you don’t think you saying anything will make any difference then just report it to the council. It sounds really unpleasant @NotASoccerMum. Sorry you’re having to deal with this.

My dad had rats coming in for the bird and chicken food years ago. Then we got 6 cats and a rat has never been seen since😂

you can fortify your fences and dig them even deeper to avoid any vermins coming from other gardens.

I had this same issue, my dog was going mad to get in to next door’s garden, sat once and starred at one spot on the gate for hours, the other side is raised decking and then they have a bird feeder next to that. There was a huge pile of bird food on the floor. Any source of food it will attract rats. I went and knocked on the door and mentioned it. She was happy enough to take the bird food away. Does hasn’t acted strange since. I would just go round and have a gentle word. Like you say they are nice enough and they should care about their home and garden. Rats will eat through anything…. Once in the house they will destroy anything in their way. good luck.

I have something similar with my neighbours. They were leaving a ridiculous amount of "bird food" that was attracting rats. They'd get their carer to put it all out, including some of it in ground feeders, each evening.

They had a rat nest in their garden and we found out they even had them in their house! It was a fight to get them to stop. We had to report to Environmental Health. Neighbors ignored the first warning they received from them but did eventually comply.

However, now they have started leaving out shelled peanuts in a hanging basket. Again, it's put out overnight so it's all eaten before they even open their curtains so I don't see the point. I saw a massive rat yesterday after several months of not seeing any.

Yeah I had to stop feeding the birds a few years ago as we had a mum rat bringing her 3 babies to scamper up our small tree and slide down the bird seed feeders I had hanging there to dislodge the seeds - was sweet to watch but no I didn't want a big rat problem. I filled in the hole they had made under my fence and completely stopped feeding the birds (I have cats so the birds are safer now and hopefully finding food in another garden). I think you definitely need to raise your concerns with your neighbour OP but in a sensitive manner maybe?

The council won’t care, environmental health won’t care. I speak from experience with a very similar problem. We have to keep rat poison out year round which has worked.

Would you not be concerned about children playing in the garden and the possibility of them contracting leptospirosis?

We had an issue last year. They got in the house and we saw them in the garden. We got the council's vermin dept bod in. He identified how they were getting in and put out a special feeder with poisoned bait. We saw the rats plenty of times in the garden - including trying their best to access the birds fat ball feeder.
They ate their way through three lots of the bait and we haven't seen any in some months now.
According to the bod they don't usually nest in houses but come in for food. The poison they use isn't available to the general public and takes a few days to work and the dead rat will be eaten by the others and they'll die as well. I guess the only concern is if a dog or cat finds a dead one - though they usually return to the nest to die.
We have bird feeders and chickens, so there's plenty of snacks about but no signs of them. No doubt they'll return and we'll just get the bod in again.

So long as they aren't getting into the house I'm not sure what harm they are doing in a garden but I totally get the urghhhh! reaction.

It’s not feeding birds from feeders, it’s the other foodstuffs that are put on the ground that will attract rats. I have a large bird feeding area (tree based) and I had to ask previous neighbour not to put THEIR leftover food in MY garden ‘for the birds’. They were encouraging rats - one of which got into the fabric of our house!
Environmental Health will stop people from ‘feeding pigeons’ if the foodstuffs are attracting rats.

One of my neighbours used to chuck leftover foods onto the grass in the kids play park in front of our street - loads of it including meat!

I asked her to stop doing it as we have a huge rat population and can see them running around between the bushes and the children are at risk.

Thankfully she understood and stopped doing it.

Well it’s a start and sounds as if you had an amicable conversation.

Let’s hope things improve.

Sorry to hear that, awful to be forced to move.

May depend on councils. We called on numerous occasions and even contacted the local councillor, MP and MSP. The response from the council was that they would not do anything unless the nests were in our garden/reported by the owner/occupier of the garden that they were located. Trust me, we tried. Didn't want to move but in the end had to as the problem was not getting sorted.

Environmental health will do something, they did for me in the past when neighbours were leaving black bags of food in their garden for months. In my case I didn’t even see any rats but I was worried it was a vermin haven.

We got a rat in our garden when the next door got a cat...cat bought it back and let it go.....was nightmare as cat had got two and they had babies....it's all sorted now

Had this issue, sadly ended up moving house. We didn't have rats ourselves, but they were using our garden as a rat run (excuse the pun) between rat nests in the gardens to the back of us. Didn't matter how much money we spent on traps/poison/professional vermin control as the issue was not in our garden there was nothing we could do. Our garden became unusable and we were frightened that they would invade our property.

Environmental health won't do anything unless the person at the address who has rats reports they have a vermin problem. Or at least that was what we found when we contacted the local council.