Don't use rat poison!

Don't believe the hype that they die outside....they die in the house and stink horribly. For some reason in the last few years roof rats have become a big problem in this area. I've had them really bad in a storage building in the back yard and a few here and there in the garage. I've been using good old fashion wooden snap traps and got about 5-6. But it seems like the last few rats get wise to the traps and won't be caught.

So I decided to give in a try poison, I put some in the garage and some in the storage building. It disappeared the first night so I put more out, next day almost gone, few days later it was all gone so I put more out again and then it stopped being eaten. All right...must have got all of them finally I thought!

Well....it's been about two weeks since the last time any poison was eaten. Over the weekend we thought we were smelling a bad smell in the house but it would come and go. Well....yesterday around 2:00 pm it became very strong! I went up in the attic and started looking but couldn't smell it up there, I looked anyways. I thought maybe it was in the duct work since the smell was strong in the house but not in the attic. After cutting three of the flex lines open and looking everywhere up there I gave up....about 6 hrs later! I turned that attic upside down looking for dead rats, digging through that old black insulation I found lots of nesting areas but no bodies. What a terrible job already, an attic in a home built in 1960 is not a fun place to be. Can't stand up so its crawling all over in horribly itchy dirty insulation, plus it's Texas so it's already hot in the attic. I wore a mask and it was black with dust by the time I got down from up there.

After coming down and being greeted with the smell of death in my house I starter using my sniffer and narrowed it down to one room. By this time it was 11pm and I was exhausted so I opened the window, put a fan in it to pull air out of the room and closed the door.

Couldn't sleep all night, kept thinking I was smelling that horrible death smell and waking up. Luckily it was isolated to that single room but still. So again today, using my sniffer narrowed it down to a single place on floor at the base of the wall.....yup....in the wall. So cut it open and no rat but the smell was even stronger. Cut through the second layer of wall board and there he was, between the outside brick and the middle layer of wallboard. What a stink! Already had maggots on it.....must have been dead a week I would guess and just yesterday popped and really started letting the stench out!

It still stinks in that room but it's going away. I put some arm and hammer pet fresh carpet odor powder in the wall and around the area. Now it just smells like a dirty diaper in there, still smelly but a lot better than the smell of rotten death! I'm betting in a day or two it will be gone.

So I will NEVER use poison in the house again!!! NEVER NEVER NEVER!!! They will not go die outside like people say, they will die in your house and stink it up. I have some pics if anyone wants to see....

Hopefully I can sleep tonight! Tomorrow I need to start trying to find where they are getting in the house in the first place.

 

I want to add that during some online research I found out that some people will not, or can't, find the dead rat and just ride it out. I can't imagine living with that smell for any longer than we did, which was not even two full days. I read it can take 5-6 weeks to a year for the smell to completely go away on it's own without removal of the dead critter.....no way.

It would be a great weight loss strategy, however, until just a few hours ago I hadn't eaten anything at all since yesterday morning. No way can you eat while smelling that smell.

 

Same thing happened to me, from the ooze I could see dripping down the inside wall when looking up from under the floor of the house under the room where the worst of the smell was could tell its exact location but couldn't see or get to it.

In the end decided to put a large sized Damp Rid bucket under the house where the drips where and then a couple of normal sized Damp rids in the room including under the bed, seemed to help a lot by sucking any moisture from the air and the smell was gone totally in about 3-4 weeks, noting that under my house is always bone dry anyway no matter how much it rains.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0MkIPGKdAk

 

We have it as well. On the plus side the damn thing die and I don't have to listen to the wife but for one week of smell!

 

To remove those smells, get some bags of charcoal. Use generous amounts, and change it out every couple of days or earlier. It'll remove the smells.

A friend of mine left a bag of shrimp in the Suburban, in August, in Florida, for 3 days. Talk about a horrific smell. Two bags of charcoal and 4 days later, you'd never know what had happened.

 

What kind of charcoal? Regular grilling lump charcoal? The smell is just about gone now anyways. But....my wife thinks she smells another one in a different part of the house. I kinda smell it but then I'm not sure. There was no question with the last one. But it did seem to come and go a few days before it became completely obvious....so I guess we could have another one. Great.

I figure I'll know for sure by this evening or tomorrow if there is another one.

 

Sorry - should be natural wood charcoal. They sell it at Tractor Supply. You can even take bundles of it and hang it in a mesh netting/pantyhose type of material so that the air can circulate through it.

 

That's why there are rat traps and cheese! Works every time. Or a live cage trap and a barrel of truth works great also.

 

Feeling very depressed now...spent all day looking for a second one with no luck. I can smell it but can't seem to find it. I think I may know where it is but I will have to remove paneling to get to it. The smell isn't near as bad as the one I found yesterday but I'm sure it's there. Unless I'm smelling things...but I don't think so.

Crud....what a mess. Base boards ripped out, holes cut in the walls, furniture all moved around and nothing to show for it. I'm going to seal it all back up and see how bad the smell is tomorrow. If it's worse then I guess it's time to start taking out paneling.

I don't know if I can do a month of smelling that stink. It's very humid here so I'm not quite sure how that will affect it, should actually speed it up, especially if the flies find it. But I would think the humidity would make it smell worse while it's going on!

 

once you get that smell in your nose...it never leaves. Every fall I get mice. Never had rats. And two cats that have no clue what a mouse is, other than a toy...

 

Sympathize - we have a guy at work whose feet/boots smell like dead rats. Rat poison not an option. I guess.

 

Had a pad on a slope. I kept my kitchen window open some to circulate air. A tree outside kept growing . How nice I thought. I hear a noise coming from behind my stove. A rat (Rattus Norvigicus) aka, one a them big SOBS, has climbed the tree and thinks we are gonna share meals.. I go for the .44 mag and then after a little thought figure oot that I if is shoot the damn thing the bullet is gonna keep going and into my gas furnace in the basement. Not a good thing.

 

Is he a harleydood? This is a legal defense in some places.

 

Y'know, actually he is - he speaks of a fabled '83 hardtail 'sporty' that he has ridden everywhere - but we've never seen him on a bike.

Dang, hadn't even thought of the hardley connection.

 

Or, you poison them and they go die in your neighbor's house. Why I don't speak to my neighbor anymore!

 

Oh wow....ya that wouldn't be good....I guess you shouldn't have told them you did it. Lol.

I was thinking it would be safe to leave poison out in my storage building but if they will go as far as a neighbors house to die?!?!....then they could for sure eat it in the back yard and make their way back into my house to die and stink it up again.

 

Well....still haven't found the second one....if there is a second one. It's spring break so yesterday we decided to load up the kids and make a trip to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The wife and I were both smelling dead rats all over that place, we would be walking along and stop and look at each other and say "there's a dead rat in that wall". So like Keager said, get that smell in your nose and it never leaves, or in my case I just smell it everywhere.

We were expecting the smell to be overwhelming yesterday when we got home, after being away from the house all day, but no smell. Now I can only smell it if I close the doors and windows and turn on the vent hood, then I can smell it coming in through areas around trim and such that's not sealed and is allowing attic/wall air inside.

So I think I'm going to use this as a way to tell where drafts are coming in and using some painters caulk start sealing up gaps. I knew this house was drafty but didn't know it was this bad. Around the front door trim seems to be the worst draft of all. I'm going to pull the trim off and spray some of that foam in the gap between the sheet rock and door frame and then put the trim back on and seal around it with caulk. That should help. Then seal up the base boards/quarter round and get some of those outlet gaskets and seal those up as well.

So if there is a second dead critter it's either something smaller like a baby rat or mouse or it's in a location that is not letting as much stink in as the last one. I think it may be over the porch or on an eve, either of those places I can't see from the attic. I dunno....it's quite a bit warmer today than it's been all week, if it doesn't really start stinking today then I guess it's not going to.

 

The only way this dude had an 83 Sportster with a hard tail is somebody swapped the shocks on the swingarm for struts or he just has lead in his ass and stinky feet..