
The Case for Leaving City Rats Alone (2016) - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/69/patterns/the-case-for-leaving-city-rats-alone-rp
======
teslabox
In rural Arizona we deal with pack rats [0]. These are sometimes-destructive
nuisances. For example, my father replaced his car's spark plug wires. The new
wires rapidly disappeared - apparently rodents need to chew hard things to
keep their teeth from getting too long. Father bought a second set of wires
from the same company, which again rapidly disappeared. Apparently some kinds
of spark plug wires are coated with rodent bait (peanut oil?). The third set
of wires was from a different company. These did not have rat bait like the
other company's wires.

My neighbor leaves their vehicle hoods open while on their rafting trips... he
also uses live traps to catch and relocate the rats around his house.
Otherwise pack rats will set up a nest in vehicles' engine area, destroying
the wires and filling it with twigs and food.

An Arizona company [1] came up with a sort of poison that only targets
rodents' reproductive organs: "ContraPest contains the ovotoxic chemical
4-vinylcyclohexene diepoxide (VCD), which is a known killer of oocytes in
immature ovarian follicles. The rat version of ContraPest also contains
triptolide, which the company reports has adverse reproductive effects on both
males and females. The product has been successfully used to sterilize both
male and female mice, rats, and dogs." [2]

As "Mr. Pack Rat" explains, it's better to understand the pack rat than to
indiscriminately poison them, as rodent predators fall victim to secondary
poisoning with standard city-rat poisons, which makes pack rat problem worse
[3].

[0]
[https://www.mrpackrat.net/packrats.html#six](https://www.mrpackrat.net/packrats.html#six)

[1] [https://senestech.com](https://senestech.com)

[2]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ContraPest](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ContraPest)

[3]
[https://www.mrpackrat.net/poison.html#fou](https://www.mrpackrat.net/poison.html#fou)

~~~
kkylin
Oh gosh, packrats are such a PIA. They seem to love garages when they can get
in -- I guess no snakes, no birds of prey, no bobcats, etc. And this thing
about chewing wires in cars.

------
scurvy
This article is misguided. A rat outside quickly becomes a rat inside your
home after someone leaves the door open too long on a nice day.

They also gloss over the disease vector aspect of picking up bacteria from
pets. People aren't giving up pets, but we will decide to get rid of rats.

I applaud the study for learning more about the rats and their qualities. Now,
go eradicate them.

~~~
shhehebehdh
I don’t know if most rats enter the home through the front door. I would guess
that is pretty rare. Unsealed crawl spaces and attics are much more likely to
be the culprit.

Even then, they don’t necessarily do any harm. As long as the interior of the
home is sealed, they can’t get in. Our building definitely has rats, and we
saw one in our home shortly after we rented it. The previous tenants had just
trapped rats they saw, but we insisted that the landlord send someone to seal
every ingress point (with copper wool and silicone gel). Since then we haven’t
had an issue, even though our little visitor would come daily before.

As a bonus, the same way rats get in, so do cockroaches. In NYC, older
buildings, especially near the ground floor, are notorious for cockroach
infestations. But we don’t have any of those in our unit either, despite the
building being a century old. Turns out cockroaches and rats aren’t made of
magic. They can’t teleport through solid material. If the interior of your
home is sealed, they cannot get in.

~~~
neom
See How Easily a Rat Can Wriggle Up Your Toilet | National Geographic
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t2VPBF6Kp4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t2VPBF6Kp4)
\- Also as the owner of three pet rats, can confirm they can get through the
most ridiculously small holes.

~~~
grawprog
I've found rats living inside the CNC machines at my work. Under the rail
covers at the very front just past the sensor that stops the machine from
travelling further. There's a tiny hole underneath the rails that would have
been the only way in. I also found them living inside another machine at work.
The only way to access where they were living in that one would have been to
crawl up the drain pipe and squeeze under the tiny gap between the cover. I
also found one dead between two slabs of stone. No idea how it got there

My house however lacks rats. We've had an ongoing competition between the two
cats. They're pretty evenly matched at this point for rats and mice caught.

