Help! Mouse/rat in the house!

[SparkleFly]

My cat has a habit of bringing in mice in the summer months. She'll keep doing it until she annihilates the whole family, day and night. Usually we either find them dead, or they scurry around in plain sight and we can quickly catch and dispose of them. This time, she brought a few bigger ones in, dead, but now we have something in our kitchen which we suspect is a small rat. It's eaten through packets of pasta and cat treats, and we've had to remove everything from the lower cupboards. It also seems to like eating plastic as it ate through an old toothbrush that I keep under the sink for cleaning. We've put humane traps down as I heard they are better, and tried putting chocolate, cat treats and meat in them, but no success.

Now I've come down to find a packet of raisins that were on the worktop has been eaten through in the night 🤢 and this is seriously grossing me out now. Any idea how I get rid of it?

Husband says call pest control but there's little point as the cat is likely to bring another one straight in.

We have 2 small children, age 2 and 6, so I'm not comfortable with using the poison. Also I obvs don't want to poison the cat.

I had a rat in the house during Covid, we tried everything including humane and then non humane traps, in the end we called out pest control who put some bait in the cupboard where it had been breaking into packets of flour etc. It took a good few days for it to eat the bait - the pest controller explained they were super suspicious creatures and suspected anything new in the environment - but eventually did and unfortunately died under the floorboards with the ensuing horrible smell for a bit. We had to call in pest control as it ended up eating through the dishwasher cables (presumably to get water) and that was both expensive and dangerous.

I would call pest control and explain your circumstances and concerns and see what they suggest. I feel for you!

I would close the cat flap, if you have one.

I think rats chew to keep their teeth filed down as they carry on growing throughout life. If they can’t file them down they’ll eventually die. So they’ll chew anything hard. NDN had an infestation due to landlord not paying for pest control when the first one was seen. When I managed to get Environmental Health involved the rats had taken over the garden and house and effected me greatly as my terriers were going mad to catch them if they visited my garden ( but a little too slow). For four years I couldn’t open my windows in case they popped in.
get pest control in now OP. It’s worth it. NDN were forced to do so by council and I’d say the rats were finally gone in a month or so. If the rat is a mummy rat you won’t just have one rat soon

Thanks, I've enquired with a pest control company and also spoken to the guys at work who mainly live in rural locations. They've advised that rat poison has worked for them, just put it right out of the way, so under the kitchen kickboards. I'll try that first as it's a lot cheaper than pest control. Fingers crossed it works 🤞 I think if we didn't know where they had come from then I'd go with pest control but as we know my cat has brought it in, I don't think we need a survey.