How to prevent rat in the garden

[thebellagio]

We have discovered a rat in the garden - can anyone help us get rid of it?

We have a situation whereby we cut back some overgrown bushes at the back of the garden, and discovered that there are no fence panels along the back boundary (we only moved in in Sept). The house directly behind us has a row of trees and overgrown brambles which acts as privacy, but it means that the tree roots make it extremely difficult to install fence posts.

We've discovered that there is a rat living in their brambles and is coming into our garden (we know it's coming from there as we've seen it dash back multiple times). We've removed all bird seed and bird feeders from our garden and we thought that had worked, but we saw it again this morning (it's so weird, it keeps coming out in the middle of the day!).

I guess I have two questions

How can I try to block up access in my garden to prevent the rat from getting in, and what can I do to try and get rid of it? We have a dog, so we can't lay any poison down.

I asked a local tradesman about fencing, he said the usual fence posts would be almost impossible to put in because of the tree roots. We wondered about something like bamboo slat screening, but I don't know how you install them or even if that is enough to try and keep the rat out?

We had rats under our deck. I didn't want to put down poison because of the fear that my dog would eat a dead rat containing poison. The thing that worked for us was mixing plaster of paris powder with flour and some powdered buillion/stock and putting that out for the rats. The plaster of paris sets in their stomach and kills them. You can also mix in bicarb of soda instead of plaster of paris, it bubbles up in their stomach and they can't burp so explode.

We live in quite a dense suburban area and I don't want rats living right next to my house so that's why I got rid of them. If I lived in a country area and they were just occasionally coming into the garden from outside I think I would let them be.

I live in the middle of a wood so have all types of wildlife. A squirrel chewed through my diesel pipe on my car, lost half a tank of fuel. I bought heavy duty traps for rats after I spotted one in the garden. I put them down once I've got the dogs and cat in for the night. Caught 3 and haven't seen any more. Just keep moving the traps

Please don't do this DIY home mix. It is barbaric and also a risk to other wildlife and pets.

jesus thats barbaric!!!!!

Fucking hell, what is wrong with you.

@BlackAmericanoNoSugar that is so unnecessarily cruel of you.

A cat (or preferably two!) is an obvious solution - as @Antarcticant says, if they like to hunt, they will get the rats eventually, but even the smell of cat wee etc around the place will be a deterrrent to rats.

You’re not looking to fortify your garden against rats, normally - more to stop them coming into your house and to make your garden less attractive than your neighbours’…

Leave it alone, it’s not doing you any harm. Poor little thing!

Get rid of thenloody decking if the rats that live under it are troubling you to such an extent! Decking is basically rat paradise. And nothing deserves such a horrific death.

OP you could try clearing the ground on your side as much as you can, cutting the very low branches of trees and removing any scrub. They prefer to skirt along edges and stay hidden. Also, just move stuff around a lot - they hate that. Maybe let your dog wee and poo there so the scent discourages them.

Fencewise, could you sink wooden stakes in and staple chicken wire to it? It won't deter a rat as they happily climb but might discourage them a bit and will contain your dog.

Thing is if they are coming into your garden it/they (chances are it is not the same rat each time) must have a reason - could be neighbours place is over-run and they are spreading further afield looking for food.
So could end up in garage, shed, house if it finds a way in.
If nothing is done they're unlikely to go. I would say they can climb a typical fence ( they climbed the pole to our birdhouse feeder , then ran down with their stash).
Poison is best from a closed bait box in/ next to neighbours garden.

The most humane way to kill rats is with traps, as long as they are caught and killed instantly.

Do not use poison! As PPs have said, other wildlife could eat them and die from the poison. The other issue is that if a rats gets under someone's decking or inside their house (under floorboards etc) and then dies from the poison, the stink will be horrendous (the bitter voice of experience )

I saw one rat in the garden of our old house. By the time DH had come home from work I’d spent £50 on traps and poison. It kept them at bay, however as soon as he neglected putting the poison out for a couple of weeks he found evidence that they were starting to get under the bonnet of my brand new BMW. Never a day went by where we didn’t put the poison, in bait traps, down after that.

They might have been “doing their own thing” but I didn’t want them in my house or ruining my car.

Rats are vermin that carry Weil’s disease, chew through anything from wiring to structural woodwork, and breed at an explosive rate. They are not harmless little fluffy things to be happily encouraged around your property, as some PPs seem to think. One pair of rats can multiply to 1250 in just one year - females can have 40 offspring a year each, who reach breeding age themselves at just nine weeks.

It's fine to kill rats - a lot of local authorities around where I live have had to get tough on them as there were loads around! Rats send out the male to look for food.

I do think killing them in a cruel way is unnecessary and also you'll almost certainly have rats in your garden if you have chickens, feed birds etc as they're attracted by the food you use - it'll attract mice too like wood mice but they're cuter so...

As far as I know, a rat won't come near your house unless there's food/water/nesting materials so just best to make it 'un-tempting' for them.

@Babdoc when I was a child we lived round the corner from a council dump and also at the back of our houses was a passageway where bins were stored and a church with a churchyard (overgrown brambles and so on, no graves). There were loads of rats until finally the dump was redeveloped and houses built there and also the passageway was kept clearer. Rats will always find homes where they have a plentiful supply of food, water etc. Didn't stop my childhood cat from catching at least one a day, dead and alive!

I don’t think they’re fluffy at all, nature isn’t cute, I grew up on a farm so I know that for Christ sake. I just don’t recoil in horror at the sight of a perfectly normal creature going a perfectly normal thing in a perfectly unsurprising location, and I certainly don’t get the urge to kill it and other wildlife with poison or blow up its insides.

And quite possibly illegal. Although the law permits the killing of certain pests, it has to be done in a way which causes as little suffering as possible.

Agree.

I put food down for mine. But I love rats.

I don't see them as any different to hedgehogs, birds, foxes etc. They all have fleas, ticks, mange... But rats get all the flack.

They're lovely creatures.

Rats are just like humans in as much as they like somewhere dry to sleep and have their babies and a food source to nourish themselves. It's a bit of a myth that they live in sewers, they just tend to use them as a road system. Remove the places that they like and that's half the battle.

We had rats living under a shed which is close to the house in our small garden, and after hearing the awful stories told by those who had found them indoors we felt we had no choice but to try and get rid of them.
We tried alsorts of things over several weeks but nothing worked, and in the end we paid for professional help. The man that came told us that nothing available over the counter would eradicate them completely as for the most part they had become immune to the poisons.
He was able to show us the different routes the rats were using to reach the nest and he put down a couple of traps that he returned a fortnight later to collect. He also told us that rats are all but blind and find their way back to the nest by smell from the urine they leak. To deter them he suggested that we water diluted Jeyes fluid round the shed every week or so to mask the smell.
On his advice we took down the bird feeders and placed them elsewhere but once the rats disappeared we put them back where they where. We also put food out for the hedgehog every night in a little house right at the bottom of the garden and whilst the rats have never returned to the garden enmasse we occasionally see one pop his head in on the wildlife camera. I have no problem with this and living where we do close to marshland it would be unrealistic to think that we will ever be totally rat free.
We love seeing the wildlife in the garden and didn’t feel entirely comfortable with the poison but as the nest was so close to the house and they were in and out of it all day I was frightened of them finding a way in through a door .
Sorry for the ramble - it may just be worth anyone who is seeing rats in a specific area trying a watering can of diluted Jeyes Fluid around it every week or so.

I've got one. Mine is a brasent rat that will look at us through the patio doors then wander off. I'm scared of rats and thinking there might be a family of them. I'm scared to leave back door open, in case it comes for a wander around the house!

Honestly - a fence will not keep it out. I've seen a rat scale up a thin vertical 8 foot pole to get at a bird feeder. Its run nearby went down vertically several feet (I know from sticking a broom handle down) before it presumably turned off horizontally.

We had to remove all bird food.

We have a lot of mice around and put poison in covered bait boxes (or rather our pest control man does) outside. Essential because they get into the attic and chew wires (not to mention running around in the middle of the night with hobnail boots on).

I didn't want to go down the poison route as we have dogs. But the boxes are in locations the dogs can't get to easily. There's always the risk they might eat a poisoned mouse but apparently the bait used might give them an upset tummy but not cause any serious harm.