Over the past year or so, we’ve noticed a significant increase in rodent issues in our barn, especially rats. We’ve increased the number of traps, both hand built and purchased, and while we had some initial success (20 rats in 2 months!), coming into the dark barn after lights out would still reveal several in the turkey coop, where the messy turkeys create many a delicious snack amid the bedding even when we raise the feeders at night. A few times a year we’ve knocked them back by trying to gas them with exhaust from the farm truck, thanks to a clever weld on the farm truck exhaust pipe that allows us to fit a garden hose on, and run into the coop floor. But because we have so many animals around, poisoning the rats was never an option.
So when we had the chance to have a crew of trained rat hunters come visit us, we were excited to give it a try!
The first thing we learned is that we made a mistake when we built our chicken coop floor. When we moved in a floor was already in place, and we enlisted family help to tear the rotting floor up and replace it. But when we built the new floor, we just put it at the same level as the old one, which is pretty much perfect for a rat castle, and not so great for ever allowing us to get in there and kick the rats out. Oops. This limited the hunting team’s ability to really go after the rats, as they were safely settled into the middle of the floor under the chicken coop, and unreachable. Glad we’ve put off building a floor for the turkey coop til now, so we’ll know to raise it up high enough to be able to get under it and make it less hospitable.
That doesn’t mean we didn’t catch a few! It was so much fun to see the dogs do what they were meant to do, and they clearly enjoyed it.
Guess we know what’s going on the task list for 2016… new coop floors!
