Thursday, November 1, 2012

Critters in the garage

Lately I have been battling critters who try to make my garage their home.  I don't have any issue with that except for when they damage things, then I go to war.

What usually ends up living in the garage is rats.  When I first noticed that there were rats living in the garage, I tried sticky traps.  The problem with the sticky traps, is rats are strong enough to drag the traps with them and sometimes I never found them.  Other times when I did find them, there was a really angry rat stuck to the trap and that posed a new problem.  I had to find a way to kill them before I could dispose of it.  This was really difficult for me since I am a real animal lover.... I even raised rats as pets when I was a kid.  My pet rats were hooded rats and I have fond memories of them. A friend told me about a trap called the Rat Zapper.  This trap would electrocute the rat quickly so they did not know what hit them.  I think this is the most humane way of dealing with rats.  This morning there was a young gray rat in the trap.  I had mixed feelings about finding him, first I was glad I got him so he would no longer be living in the garage and damaging anything else. On the other hand, I thought of my pet rat Goober and it sort of broke my heart that this rat's life was cut short.

Not long ago, I was dealing with another kind of critter.  I still have not positively identified what the critter was, but it could have been a barn owl or maybe a rat snake.  I found what looked like an owl pellet on the garage floor, but it could have been what was left over when a snake digests what it could and spit out the rest.  I was told that if I left my radio on 24/7, then whatever this critter was would leave. This actually worked!!   I guess they are not fans of good classical rock.  The radio did not seem to run off the rats however, so the battle of the rats continues....

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