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Assault brand rodenticide


Valhalla
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I was at our local feed store today and inquired about an effective rat poison that was safe for mammals and birds. I was told that Assault rat bait made by Purina Mills is safe, so I bought some. Before putting it out, I did some research and found this: http://jvdi.org/cgi/reprint/2/2/123.pdf

Doesn't sound too safe to me!

 

We have tried rat traps, but I get tired of re-setting them night after night. Those glue traps work, but they aren't cheap and only catch two at a time before you have to throw them away. Plus, both these methods only catch the young rats... no adults.

 

Anyone have any suggestions for effective rat control that is safe for dogs?

 

Thanks

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No, sorry. We had a huge rat problem at our old place - they were tunneling under the log barn and undermining it. We got those lock boxes for bait (the metal ones) and put the boxes up in the loft where the dogs never went.

 

Our cat didn't hunt in the barns, though, so we didn't have to worry much about that part of it.

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What about a terrier? A friend of mine had a huge problem with rats when she first moved in. They had taken over her stable. Her Jack Russell mix caught and killed all of them! She hasn't seen a rat in years. At my old house, I had a lot of voles. I would find them in my feed and all over. One of my male BC's was really excited by the voles and started to catch them. He would sit by the door of the feed shed and wait for me to open it. He could catch the voles before they went under the floor. They were dead within seconds and completely eradicated in a few months. I had a lot of mice in my new barn so I decided to get cats. I know the mice aren't completely gone, but at least they don't scatter every time I go into the tack room and the whole barn doesn't smell like mice anymore. I am pretty paranoid about any type of poison and am not great about setting traps, but have had a lot of luck with cats/dogs eradicating the rodents.

 

Emily

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Emily -

The lady who owns the barn where I used to board my horses had the same experience. She had huge, cat-sized rats who would tunnel under the stalls and leave holes daylight shone through. Then someone gave her a JRT, and within a month we never saw another rat. :rolleyes:

 

Of course, some people thought we were better off with the rats. :D

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Our BC's dig at the rat holes and make them even bigger. Woudn't a JRT do the same thing? We have two barn cats and they help with the mice and baby rats, but the big hinkin' momma rats are still there. I bet they are miltiplying as I type this. :rolleyes:

 

My experience with vermin is not the rat variety.

 

Our smooth haired fox terrier very effectively removed all traces of moles/voles when we had her.

 

Our current cat has a variety of nicknames (easy to do when discussing a 21 lb--on a diet--cat), but his best one is "Bloomberg, Bat-Slayer", for effectively ridding our home of a young big brown bat problem we had a few summers ago. (The 125 yr old church 3 doors down was doing steeple work...and we think the workers upset a soon-to-fledge nursery brood. We checked our attic, detached garage...and there was no colony with us, but we had 3 adolescent males in the house within a month. Fatboycatboy got all three.)

 

Perhaps the four-legged kind of rodenticide is the least potentially dangerous to the other four leggers.

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Our BC's dig at the rat holes and make them even bigger. Woudn't a JRT do the same thing?

 

I do remember Sparky digging after the rats, so I guess for a little while he made the problem worse. But he managed to eradicate all the rats, so after that the situation improved tremendously. I'm still amazed he was able to exterminate them all - this was a two-barn boarding facility with over 30 head of horses, and I wouldn't have thought one little dog no bigger than a football could've done it.

 

Sparky is the only non-hyper JRT I've ever met, but I think it's because he actually gets tired out every day at work. :rolleyes:

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Our BC's dig at the rat holes and make them even bigger. Woudn't a JRT do the same thing? We have two barn cats and they help with the mice and baby rats, but the big hinkin' momma rats are still there. I bet they are miltiplying as I type this. :rolleyes:

 

 

Barkley was pretty stealthy. He would catch the voles outside of their holes. They would usually be out and about around the time I would feed and Barkley would sneak up and pounce on them. He was surprisingly fast! Barkley could cover 5 feet before the voles could scurry a foot or two away. He was so excited about his rodent catching duties. When we went back to the barnyard the first thing he would do would be to sit and wait for me to open the door. A terrier probably would dig into the hole though.

 

Emily

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Christine, some friends used a couple Rat Zappers and said they did a good job eradicating rats in their barn. They're traps that kill mice and rats with a battery powered shock and are supposed to be safe for cats and dogs. See www.ratzapper.com.

 

Oh, yes, I'd forgotten about these. One of my neighbors uses the mouse-sized ones. They're very effective. I know this because, while my neighbor was between her last husband and her present boyfriend, I used to have to go to her house and extricate the little rodent corpses from the zappers. :rolleyes:

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I generally use mouse traps in the fall, when the little buggers get in my house. I bait them with PB, and usually catch a few mice who are trying to bed down for the winter.

 

As far as the Assault goes - rats are mammals, so I'd say if it kills rats, it's not safe for mammals. I try to avoid all the chemical rodenticides, because of the dog.

 

One of my strongest memories is from when I was watching my niece's young, $1,000 Westie. I was working on my computer, and the dog went into the laundry room, where the washer and dryer sat up on palettes. She crawled under the palette and came out, proudly wagging, with a box of rat poison in her mouth. Sunday morning at 5:30! Luckily, there was a vet nearby to give her a vitamin K shot within a couple hours..

 

Mary

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I vote for a terrier as well. We don't have rats (thankfully) but DustyBA is the best mouser I have (cats stay inside so Dusty does the outside work) He also catches snakes. He is extremely determined and absolutely refuses to come inside until he has finished hunting. He's even catching mice now with +2 ft of snow in the yard! It was -25C a couple of nights ago and he was 'waiting' for a mouse!

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