Our house is infested with really big rats, we tried everything to trap them but they ended up figuring it out and evading traps. Time to pull out the big guns and get a kot but these rats are big I hear them scattering at night and it sounds like raccoons. I'm scared of the kots getting hurt, so I'm thinking of getting maine coons, they're big muscular and excellent hunters but the breeder closest to me wants $2800 for each. Any less expensive kots that are excellent mousers and are big enough not to be fragile?
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i am a big fan of cats, but a terrier will destroy far more rats/mice than a cat will.
the dog autism makes it unable to not attack something small and furry when it sees it. the whimsical nature of the cat will make it only attack if it wants to in that moment.
there's also monitor lizards, if you like lizards. those frickers will annihilate rats, but idk if they're as autistically violent as terriers.
he looks pretty damn vicious and effective.
> but idk if they're as autistically violent as terriers.
They aren’t. That guy with the Argus monitor who uses dogs and mink was going to use the monitor like a mink, not like a dog, but he wasn’t successful because his monitor ended up being a female and never grew big enough to fight rats.
considering it now, i guess it depends on the training of the lizard. or rather, how trainable it can be.
the video here
shows the lizard has been decently trained to catch the mouse and let go when prompted to let go. but imagine it requires the lizard to be kept hungry on a day you intend to hunt mice. the lizard's robotic lizardbrain likely will not drive it to hunt when it isn't hungry.
Yeah, it was a very interesting project from the point of view of pushing the boundaries of lizard training, it’s a shame it didn’t turn out. I think he may have tried a different lizard after giving Clint Raptor, but then Shuri got hit by a car and that caused him a lot of mental health strain.
get a fox
Cats emit chemicals that scare mice away from home because these chemicals are found in the saliva of their pets and trigger sensory organs in mice that spread fear and terror. The people that keep refusing Cats are usually the ones trying to sell you a service as exterminators.
This is the dumbest fricking moron shit ive read all day
no, that doesn't work.
https://petkeen.com/will-mice-leave-if-they-smell-cat/
>If mice react with terror at the scent of a cat, why don’t they leave the house if a cat is in it? The answer can vary, but the shortest and most direct answer is that mice can fit into places that cats cannot. You may not see mice in the same part of your home that your cat frequents. But mice are resourceful and can find other areas to live in safely.
>If you have a mouse in your kitchen and your cat is usually in the living room, the mouse doesn’t detect as much danger and can find small places in which to curl up and hide. Even though the cat may enter the room, the mouse feels secure enough in their established domain to not be pushed out of the home. If the mouse lives in a hole in the wall or a cabinet, they will know that the cat can’t reach them in these places.
https://www.livescience.com/7494-cat-urine-mice-macho.html
>Unexpectedly, two months of cat odor did not lead to cowering mice, as one might expect from constant threatening. Instead, researchers found it led to aggressive males. These were more than twice as likely fight with other mice than rodents exposed to rabbit urine for the same amount of time.
>And such combative males smelled delectable to females. When presented with male pee, females that were in heat spent more time sniffing urine from males exposed to cat odor for weeks than ones that had inhaled rabbit fumes.
cats have never been rodent control. they are just pets. you may think they are rodent control because the mice hide from the cat, but mice and rats are still present and their population is growing as long as they have a food source, a water source, and a hiding place. they can still breed and feed outside your property and come back in as well.
if they killed so many rats why are there still rats? don't waste your money.
Notice how that site Is trying to recommed you to hire a service, link and all, like every fricking site saying that.
Dogs need to be trained to catch mice, which is a compromise to do (if you can do it, more power to you), cats only need to be encouraged by play in an early stage. Also a rat terrier Is More expensive than a fricking American short hair you could get for free, which every anon here fricking ignores.
>Notice how that site Is trying to recommed you to hire a service, link and all, like every fricking site saying that.
Gee, I wonder how you actually get rid of a rat infestation? You can also do it yourself, by cleaning your shit up, sealing up your house, and letting traps do their work. It's not a conspiracy to make you spend more money, especially when owning a cat without being abusive could easily cost you $1000+ per month and OP is considering $2800 cat.
Not a cat. Cats have never gotten rid of rats.
Oh, and speaking of abuse, trying to set up a cat to hunt or live outside is animal abuse.
extremely low iq post
>$2800
you could get this homie to come over for an afternoon for $800
pic
They're not kittens, they're adults with a confirmed kill count of countless of rats according to the owner
>according to the owner
who is trying to sell gullible morons $2800 cats
Anya is the true MVP here boys.
Your dog is as bad as a cat
Leave the wildlife alone if you aren’t hunting for sustenance
b***h please this is a cannel duck. I gave it to some lady on craigslist afterwards.
A couple big male cats+ Is the best legal pest control you can get
as in you control two pests not that the cats control pests
because cats don't control pests and never have
only if there's nada for barn owls within a half mile. it is legally sketchy, but you could acquire a few live ones from someone who has a bunch living in their barn. just don't let the DNR find out, make sure it's all cash, and once established the population isn't likely to leave as long as they aren't harassed or starved for food/space.
they like nest boxes in the open but shielded from wind.
also never use any poisons, all rat poisons will make them drop dead.
okay, I don't have a rat problem anyway I just like owls
Chad Anya BTFOs all y'all's animals.
Cats have never ever been rodent control
Every time someone swears they are, investigation turns up rats in every crevice.
https://travislongcore.net/2021/05/15/no-chicago-feral-cats-dont-control-rats/
Never, ever, have they succeeded. They modify rat behavior so they escape human detection, but cats have never gotten rid of rats. Saying that rats can be exterminated by cats is like saying malamutes are a substitute for everything from drafts horses and oxen up through engines. Just because some primitives thought so doesn't mean it's true. Their civilizations are all either gone or in ruins for a reason.
It's because they were wrong about almost everything.
>this is dog fricking cat hate!
No, it's the admission that your cat's job is to be a cute lap warmer. If you let your cat out to kill stuff, most of what they kill will not be rats, they prefer lizards/birds, and you are abusing your cat by forcing their instincts to drive them to an activity that carries a significant risk of injury and acquiring parasitic and bacterial infections.
Basically, you hate cats, because you worship them, you hurt them.
Gee maybe the dog that has it in its fricking name
Get a Rat Terrier
Get a dog OP. This was caught by my dog a couple of days ago.
My mom has 3 pomeranians, they've done nothing
Bad breed, get something with atleast 7% beagle.
What is a supermutt?
It means it's from North America
It means they can't identify which breeds that percentage came from.
So either so mixed they can't tell, it's a breed they haven't documented before, it's a really common set among a number of breeds, or it's something brand new.
I prefer flying cat
>a family of barn owls will eat approximately 1000 rodents during an average breeding season
Can you have owls as pets?
not really but you can set up an owl nesting box and increase your chances of getting one to pick your property as home and hunting grounds
Can’t they attack humans sometimes?
if you are a terrible butthole to your owl, yes
an owl will 6-12 or so mice every single night without fail, and that's when they don't have chicks. if they have chicks, add 4xChick#.
owls + foxes = god tier rat extermination program.
fun fact: wolf reintroduction was important because coyotes, foxes, and whatnot were genociding the small mammal population. wolves would hunt or harass the mesopredators but rarely eat their prey.
tell me about attracting owls
Figure out which species live in your area. Barn owl is best owl for pest control if you have them because they eat almost exclusively rodents and unlike almost all other owls they are not very territorial and you can have multiple families living in a relatively small area as long as there's enough mice and rats to go around. Then either build or buy a nest box which is appropriately sized for the type of owl you want to attract. The specifications and nesting season for every type of owl is easy to find online. Make sure you place the nest box appropriately at the height and in the habitat which your chosen owl species prefers. At that point it just becomes a waiting game if you have a sufficient rodent infestation and an appropriately built and placed nest box, eventually you should get owls.
so I take it I'm screwed if I'm surrounded by a manicured lawn hellscape?
Not necessarily, barn owls prefer to hunt in open fields and can be very much at home in a suburban environment. But you do need one small clump of trees on your property where you can place the nest box if you don't have a barn. Most other species of owl however prefer more wooded areas because they are sit-and-wait ambush predators, as opposed to the barn owl which is a more active hunter. Pic related is also a very active hunter but unless you live in the Arctic tundra good luck attracting one to your yard.
Why not introduce foxes in farm areas then?
The prefer to eat your chickens
build a better enclosure then
>noooo the heckin chickerinos need to be free
i have chickens and they are afraid to leave their aviary
god I wish
I'd like to know this too. I had a gray tabby that only cared about rats and mice sometimes. Other times it would be five inches away and not care.
I thought about cutting down on the cat food so it would start hunting but I was afraid the cat would just leave me.
Size difference: Maine coons vs. Average kots
Terriers
This, cats are useless against rats, terrier dogs were bred for hunting them
Then why are they so famous for it?
Because cathomosexuals are moronic and spread fake news
Basically what happens is that the cats scent makes the rodents avoid them. They don't die, they get better a hiding in your walls. Also most domestic cats despise actually eating them. Barncats had to be locked in said barns to be convinced to live off of rodentslop.
I dont care if they eat them, they can kill them and bring them to me and I'll dispose them
It doesn't matter. The cats won't get rid of them period. You'll just have careful rats instead of ballsy rats.
Rat control 101:
Get something that kills them at a high rate. Better traps, dogs, mink. Pitfall traps like the flip-n-slide and one-way box traps are the most effective. Don't set them up as kill traps, the rats might avoid the smell of death and stop falling for them.
Eliminate all accessible food sources. Clean everything up. Food that's stored in plastic/paper bags goes in plastic or metal containers with lids.
Seal off all entrances and exits you can find. Anything 1" in diameter, and often smaller, is a rat hole.
Eliminate all accessible hiding places. Move furniture away from the walls and clean up clutter. Boxes should be checked for rodents and sealed up if still clean.
A cat will add nothing to your house but a litterbox and an entertaining lap warmer.
Will look into rat terriers, but I cant imagine how animals much smaller than even regular cats can effectively hunt rats like minks
Just look up videos if you're unconvinced
Cats do not exterminate any rodents
They are passive hunters who mostly only catch straggling juveniles, and they prefer easier prey like unaware birds and basking reptiles and amphibians.
Because people are moronic
>Be illiterate peasant
>Get cat
>Stop seeing rats
>OMG CATS GET RID OF RATS AND MICE BASED CAT
>Get rid of cat
>Rats flood out
>OMG NO CAT! CAT GOOD!
But what happened is the rats never left, the cat just caused them to be more careful so you never saw them. The flood happens because the rats were actually growing in number, and they're ballsy because they don't smell a cat.
>b-bbbbbbbut I saw the cat eating a few
Even killing 3 a day, which is the present record, the cat would not be able to outpace the migration and reproduction of new rodents.
Larger cats would theoretically do fine exterminating animals that reproduce slower, are less numerous to begin with, and have young that are easier to locate and remove from the burrow, ie: rabbits. But it would take a long time, because a cat's idea of killing more than it needs to eat is killing one or two animals a day even if it's not hungry, and a dog's idea of killing more than it needs to eat is killing everything it can find 24/7 because dogs have stronger digestive tracts and can eat meat that's been sitting out for weeks without getting sick.
>the cat just caused them to be more careful so you never saw them
What a moronic take (so, average doggay). I'll break it down for you.
wheat = thing you need to eat
rats = wheat disappears
no rats = wheat doesn't disappear
cats = wheat doesn't disappear
If rats were just more careful, wheat would disappear.
Wheat didn't disappear.
Is that simple enough for a dogbrain?
>Not rats
Here, you fail.
There are still rats. The wheat still disappears. Although you no longer directly observe the rats, they are still there, and eating their fare share of wheat... 15 to 20 grams a day, which is actually very difficult to notice for the kind of partially-civilized halfwit that originally kept cats for this purpose, especially if they are consuming it themselves.
This is why cats are not used by respectable pest control professionals and are not an approved pest control method for any business in civilization. Only superstitious peasants use them.
Cat = magical talisman that gained its status based on the observations of the illiterate and partially civilized.
I am sorry, but I may have to put this in terms a woman can understand
Cats are good pets but they are not effective working animals and never will be.
Understand? Or will you go on an estrogen fueled fit accusing me of hating cats and fricking dogs now?
Yup, when you've got 20 dairy cows each eating 15 kilos of grain and 20 kilos of silage per day, a thousand rats each as much grain per day as having 1 extra cow. If your accounting isn't accurate to within 5%, you're not going to notice a thousand rats unless you see them.
And its probably more like 200 rats, so now you have to have your grain accounted for to within 1% accuracy, if you want to notice a rodent problem when the rodents are hiding.
Hygenic food storage and building maintenance is the only real solution to a rodent problem. Traps and poisons help, hiring someone with a dog can try and bring the scale of the problem down to a level where the traps and poison can get ahead of the curve, but cats are essentially useless.
You aren't really allowed to hire a dog in many facilities. Dogs do piss and shit, just like cats, so they aren't considered healthy to have in food production.
Sure, but many facilities they can, enough that terriers for rat controls is still a boutique industry.
Yes, as in chicken coops and feedlots.
>There are still rats. The wheat still disappears.
Stopped reading there. No.
>Doesn't happen.
Yes.
Did I mention that rats also leave rat shit everywhere they steal food and rat shit also disappears with cats?
>rats leave shit everywhere they steal food
Rats can chose where to shit. They are not incontinent.
https://smallpetselect.com/how-to-litter-train-your-rat/
They normally shit where they eat to mark territory and make it easier to find their way back, but if threatened they can abstain from this behavior.
As always just because you think the rats are gone doesn't mean they're gone. Everyone to ever expect a cat to work has been delusional, disappointed, or dead from hantavirus. They became associated with satan, deception, and laziness for a reason and rodents outsmarting cats became a cultural trope as soon as people, with better accounting skills and more thorough investigations, found the rats were still there.
The rats play when the cats are away but they will also never leave.
Only black cats are associated with satan, tf are you talking about?
>cats=wheat doesn't disappear
Doesn't happen.
Anyone who thinks that they stopped losing grain when they got barn cats is someone who isn't doing a good job accounting. Because the rodents don't go away, they just start sticking to tunnels or living in the walls.
okay here's what happened
wheat = thing you need to eat
rats = wheat disappears
no rats = wheat doesn't disappear
cats = stop seeing rats figure the wheat is fine
fast forward to the spread of literacy and mathematical ability
someone weighs their grain better
notices the wheat is still disappearing
gets whacked on the head, told that if the rats ever went away the cat wouldn't have had a rat a day to eat for the past decade
terriers are developed
the rat and mouse trap industry begins
you are here. cats are widely understood to be totally ineffective as pest control and even terriers are considered a liability and food safety hazard. colony traps and hygiene are preferred. cats do not control or eliminate rats at population levels below that at which they are vermin and a major threat to human health themselves.
the vast majority of cats and dogs are just pets and they have been selectively bred for this purpose.
moron dog person, my pet cat from a store used to kill rabbits and rats, a feral starving cat family will absolutley decimate rodent population
How many per day? A ratting terrier kills every rat it can find and can reach with no regard for satiety of hunger or boredom. A cat might kill 3-5 rats a day, best case. 3-5 rats/day is barely enough to keep up with the reproductive output of 4 female rats, and that ignores any daughters that survive to puberty and have litters of their own.
>Cats do not exterminate any rodents
Not true. More precisely, depends on the cat. There is always a cat, that unlike others has a real killer instinct. My parents had a kitty, rescued from the street as a kitten and she was a beast. Not just mice, but birds and grass snakes too. She was well fed but still went to kill mode every time she saw a prey. She even tried to train their golden retriever for hunt.
Against rats, I'd recommend traps or a professional exterminator. Cats are too weak against them, and they can occasionally frick up dogs too.
>>Cats are too weak against them
That's what I was thinking too but the cats I'm thinking about are much bigger than the average cat and quite muscular.
>Cat tried to train golden for the hunt
I for one would like to know more
She wasn't particularly successful in it. The cat brought a slightly broken mouse to the dog and expected the dog to start playing with it like kittens do, but the golden firmware didn't had any routine for it.
Their synchronized sleeping projects were more successful, but I don't have a pic about that right now, so here is just the kitty in question.
>But what happened is the rats never left, the cat just caused them to be more careful so you never saw them. The flood happens because the rats were actually growing in number, and they're ballsy because they don't smell a cat.
So you agree then that cats are good at getting rid of rodents.
>bu...but the rodents are elsewhere now
Nobody claimed getting a cat will make all rodents disappear.
Cats are not the best form of pest control for rats in a house. Forget what all the morons haters say, cats do kill rats, and they do not need to be the size of a coon to murder one, but at the same time a rat can injure a cat and the more walls the rats have to hide in the less effective the cat will be. Cats are alright as a way to keep a barn controlled (but not free, and sometimes you do need to get a terrier or two to come in) or to make sure the mice in your house knows not to come out from the walls, and kill the few that don't learn, but its more of a very low cost low maintenance solution.
>Cats do not exterminate any rodents
So which one is it do cats drive nearly every other species to extinction or are they moronic potato couch who can't get off their asses for frick sakes it cant be both...
>cats don’t control rodent populations
>Well actually they do because you won’t see any rodents so you will think they control rodents but the rodents are still there but you won’t ever know it
>well actually you will notice the rodents are still there because we need to move the goalposts in order to keep our inane argument going and we can’t pick a lane
I don’t know what is happening in this thread but as much as I love cats, I would never send a cat after rats. Rats ain’t sweatin’ you, they sure ain’t sweatin’ an AVERAGE house cat either.
>#Hateuis cuz you ain’t us
>#rent free
I cant tell if this is a bot or an extremely low iq
They're anything but average, they're huge, muscular and have big appetites
They won't be living outside, they can come inside anytime through a cat door
Those cats will not exterminate rats.
>So which one is it do cats drive nearly every other species to extinction or are they moronic potato couch who can't get off their asses for frick sakes it cant be both...
Cats only drive moronic species to extinction like marsupials and wild ground nesting birds that breed slowly. Rats are imperverious to them. In europe, they're mostly killing slow breeding songbirds and exterminating wildcat populations by interbreeding with them. Sometimes there's a moronic rodent like the dormouse that breeds so slowly cats can exterminate them, but rats and mice are immune.
>Cats do kill rats
They kill some. But not enough. And never have.
Cats do not even control rats. Hiding rats are not controlled, they are eating exactly as much as they always did and the population is still growing. Having rats hiding in your walls when the cat's somewhere else is NOT a solution.
Hell yeah
cats dont kill rats
This you're not going to get anything that kills rats well enough to curb their population growth besides rat terriers or gaze hounds. Maybe ferrets or minks but they're better at working in conjunction with dogs by flushing out the rats then the dogs get them. They're a lot more industrious and can get the job done in probably a hour.
>minks
People get minks as pets to control rats?
minks are weasels, theyre like small otters, though any kind of mustelid works really, minks are just easier to use than a ferrets or badgers, because the former has digestion issues and the latter is a badger, minks already hunt voles, so its something they instinctually know
Mink are terrible pets. Some people get mink to kill rats, but that's not the same thing. If you want a job killing rats, get some mink and a couple of dogs, if you want to get rid of rats at your house, cut your grass, trim your shrubs, put food in sealed metal containers, get rid of piles of stuff (like spare lumber, scrap, etc), and go around sealing all the cracks larger than 1/4 inch with steel wool and expanding foam. Nothing beats hygiene for rodent problems.
I stored a truck in a shed where a guy was proud that his "skilled mouser" would keep rodents out of the stuff you paid him to store for you. I still put Fresh Cab rodent repellent sachets in the air cleaner and in the cab. When I went to get the truck back the next time I wanted it, it wouldn't start. I had my brother in law tow it to my house and we spent some time figuring out what was wrong with it. The exhaust was so plugged with cat food that the engine couldn't overcome the backpressure.
It wasn't the cat stuffing its kibble in my mufflers.
So how did the rats die? The cat swiping at the kibble and the rats getting stabbed with his claws?
The rats didn't die. They co-existed with the cats just fine, because cats don't control rats.
Then what was the point of filling the car up with cat kibble?
Rats store food in order to utilize it later. They don’t understand that the barn owner will feed the cat year round so there will always be kibble for them to steal from the cat.
Superstitious moron. The fact that cats are a poor control vector for rats is self-evident in the fact that Brown Rats and cats both have a cosmopolitan distribution everywhere humans live (debatably except Alberta for rats). If cats controlled rats, cat loving societies like Japan would have no rats, but there are even rats in places like Aoshima, where no agriculture occurs and feral cats are given free reign of a place with essentially no fear of larger predators.
And Alberta exterminated their rats with a campaign against poor farm hygiene that levied significant fines against offenders and a poisoning program that was ruthless in its totality, not with cats.
dogs are more popular pets than cats in japan, memebrain-kun
It’s fairly even, but there are 8.8 million cats in Japan and 7.5 million dogs, so you’re wrong. And Aoshima is a feral cat island, not a feral dog island, so I don’t see why you think that it would invalidate your argument even if you were right.