Hello everyone,
Wanted to tell you about a little situation in my neighborhood, how I dealt with it and whether others have additional suggestions.
There's a rat problem in our neighborhood (it's a nice neighborhood, just a bad combination of lots of fruit trees and lots of hiding spaces). Our next door neighbor and the house behind him have been using rat poison to deal with the problem. The consequence is that we've been finding dead squirrels, dead rats, and dead birds in our backyard and in the bushes separating the houses. Unfortunately, we usually only find them after the stink has gotten so bad in some hidden nook that we go digging around in the bushes and find the dead carcass.
We kind of just passively dealt with this until recently when we got our puppy. Almost immediately he managed to rummage around in some bushes and pull out a dead rodent and trot around happily with his find.:yikes: We had to grab him, pull it out of his mouth and then called the emergency vet who told us to make him vomit with hydrogen peroxide. Yuck.
So the next weekend we did a massive backyard clean up. Trimming back a ton of bushes, cleaning out a ton of leaves, put out new traps in high places he couldn't reach, etc. We feel a lot more comfortable that there's nothing currently dead lurking in the bushes. However, our neighbors are still using poison and if anything dies, there's no guarantee that we'll find it before Bodie does.
So today I took Bodie over to the neighbor that I think is the main culprit. I told them that he'd found a dead squirrel and that we would appreciate it if they could use traps instead of poison. They fell in love with his puppy face and said they weren't planning to put out any new poison in the near future but that traps don't really work. So I didn't really get a strong commitment from them not to use the poison going forward. So, my next step is to probably research some more on rat control methods and purchase whatever the best solution is and drop it off on their porch with another note thanking them for their help and to use these.
What are your thoughts? Any other suggestions?
Thanks!!
Goddard
Wanted to tell you about a little situation in my neighborhood, how I dealt with it and whether others have additional suggestions.
There's a rat problem in our neighborhood (it's a nice neighborhood, just a bad combination of lots of fruit trees and lots of hiding spaces). Our next door neighbor and the house behind him have been using rat poison to deal with the problem. The consequence is that we've been finding dead squirrels, dead rats, and dead birds in our backyard and in the bushes separating the houses. Unfortunately, we usually only find them after the stink has gotten so bad in some hidden nook that we go digging around in the bushes and find the dead carcass.
We kind of just passively dealt with this until recently when we got our puppy. Almost immediately he managed to rummage around in some bushes and pull out a dead rodent and trot around happily with his find.:yikes: We had to grab him, pull it out of his mouth and then called the emergency vet who told us to make him vomit with hydrogen peroxide. Yuck.
So the next weekend we did a massive backyard clean up. Trimming back a ton of bushes, cleaning out a ton of leaves, put out new traps in high places he couldn't reach, etc. We feel a lot more comfortable that there's nothing currently dead lurking in the bushes. However, our neighbors are still using poison and if anything dies, there's no guarantee that we'll find it before Bodie does.
So today I took Bodie over to the neighbor that I think is the main culprit. I told them that he'd found a dead squirrel and that we would appreciate it if they could use traps instead of poison. They fell in love with his puppy face and said they weren't planning to put out any new poison in the near future but that traps don't really work. So I didn't really get a strong commitment from them not to use the poison going forward. So, my next step is to probably research some more on rat control methods and purchase whatever the best solution is and drop it off on their porch with another note thanking them for their help and to use these.
What are your thoughts? Any other suggestions?
Thanks!!
Goddard
