How to Kill Rats in the Attic - Does Poison Work?

Okay - If I hope to accomplish just one thing with this website, it is this: to educate the public about how lousy rat poison is! It is a bad approach to rat control on every level. It is costly over time. It is a trick pest control companies use to keep you paying them forever. It is inhumane. It is potentially dangerous to other animals or you. It results in stinking dead rats odors. But most of all, it is INEFFECTIVE! Rodenticides cause rats to die of internal bleeding and hemmoraging when they eat it. Inhumane, but you may not care. What you should care about is that poison is slow, inefficient, and never solves the problem permanently. First of all, not all the rats will find and eat the poison. They mostly eat food outside, and they are scattered in your attic and house, and most of them never come across the poison. Second of all, not every rat who eats the poison will die. So you're left with living rats, which reproduce so fast, that you have the same number of rats you always had, prior to the poison. Third of all, the ones that did die will die in the attic and walls and cause a terrible odor problem. Read about dead rats in the attic if you've set out poison. Fourth, though it's unlikely because you are careful, it's possible you could get sick from poison contact, or another animal might accidentally eat it. But fifth and most importantly, the problem never gets solved! This is what the pest control companies want - they want to sign you up for a monthly or quarterly poisoning contract for life, and to keep getting paid forever - if they solve the problem, the money train stops.

Here is what you want to do - solve the problem PERMANENTLY with the only effective way to do so - you must find out how the rats are getting inside your house and attic, and you must seal shut all of these entry holes and gaps with non-chewable steel screen. If you successfully do that, the problem is solved forever! When I do a rat job, it takes just 3 days for me to stop the problem permanently. The pest control company wants three decades of your time and money! And don't forget, the longer rats are up there, the more rat damage they cause. So do it right - seal the entry holes shut. After you have done so, trapping the rats on snap traps is super easy. Read about the correct rat trapping method, and voila, the problem is solved. The pest control and rodent poison industry wants you to use their product. Don't.

How To Kill Rats In The Attic – Does Poison Work?
When you hear rats scurrying around your attic, you will want to take action as soon as possible. Because rats reproduce so quickly and don’t do well with relocation, the consensus among professionals is that killing them is the best solution. The caveat, however, is that you have to do it correctly and inhumanely and also take steps to prevent more rats from getting into your home.

Regardless of the method you use, you should never start killing rats without first making sure that more can’t get inside your attic. Take the time to thoroughly inspect the room and seal up any gaps or holes these animals can be using to get inside. Otherwise, you will find yourself with an endless stream of rats to kill as more will enter as you remove the original ones. There are numerous killing methods that people consider for taking care of rats, but only one is truly effective and humane.

Why Poison Doesn’t Work
In terms of killing rats, poison is actually one of the worst options you can come up with. In many cases, the poison will contain harsh chemicals that put your family at danger or can negatively impact the environment. Additionally, it simply isn’t always effective, taking a long time to kill the rats if it manages to do so at all. When poison does kill the rats, it will do so slowly, during which time they will be in pain, making it inhumane.

Assuming that you successfully kill the rats with poison, you will have another problem on your hands. Since it won’t work instantly, the rats will have time to go back to their nesting areas and die there. Unfortunately for you, this means the rats are likely to die in hard to reach areas, such as the gap between walls. You then have to find the dead rodents before they start decomposing and making a horrible smell or attracting flies and maggots. In some cases, you may even have to make holes in your wall to get to these areas.

Don’t Use Glue Boards
When it comes to cheap rat traps, glue boards are among the most affordable, which makes them tempting. This cheap price, however, doesn’t mean they are a good option as they end up costing a great deal over time since they are not reusable. Glue boards are also less effective than snap traps since they won’t always catch the rats or can get flipped easily. They are also incredibly inhumane, leaving the rat to die a slow death of starvation, dehydration, or exposure while it struggles to get free. Rats are also likely to lose limbs in glue boards or even gnaw a limb off to get free, making them even more inhumane.

Other Bad Methods Of Killing Rats
You will also find more creative methods of killing rats, but they aren’t necessarily more effective. Shooting the rats is clearly impractical since they are small targets that move quickly, meaning you are likely to end up with holes in your attic. Creating a water trap to drown a rat will be inhumane and rats are actually good swimmers, so this isn’t very effective either. There are even small boxes designed to trap and electrocute the rats, but they aren’t reliable at all and may just severely injure the rodent but leave it alive.

Opt For Snap Traps
If your goal is to kill the rats in your attic, then you should always opt for snap traps as these are what the professionals use. They are easy to set up, very affordable, and can be reused. Best of all, snap traps are a humane option since they are designed to kill the rat instantly without any suffering. You also won’t have to worry about finding the dead rats or knocking holes in walls to get them out before they decompose since their bodies will be right where you left the traps.

Why Relocation Doesn’t Work
Rats are one of the few types of wild animals in your attic that wildlife removal experts will suggest you kill and this can be hard to accept for animal lovers with rodents in their attic. The thing to remember, however, is that if you set up live cage traps for the rats and moved them somewhere, you would still be killing them, just more slowly. Rats typically stay within a very small area and moving them out of their territory puts them at an increased risk of attacks from predators or even the rats already living in their new area. In other words, relocated rats are almost guaranteed to die. If the rodents will die anyway, it makes sense to do it quickly and humanely and using a method that requires less time and effort on your part. If you don’t want to kill the rats yourself, you can always have a professional take care of them for you.

How to kill rats in the attic - no matter how much you may hate rats, it's a heck of a lot easier and more effective to just do a proper rat exclusion. You have the added benefit of not having to deal with rat carcasses or rotting rat odor in your house.