The Perfect Trap

Three blind mice,

Three blind mice,

See how they run,

See how they run, 

They all ran after the Farmer's Wife

Who cut off their tails with a butcher knife,

You've never seen such a sight in your life as three blind mice.

That is a crazy nursery rhyme.  It is sung with such upbeat happiness and the mixture of joy and violence sung to young children is odd, really.  You know the tune as it was the theme song for the "3 Stooges" television program.  But then there's the story of Hansel and Gretel, where the witch was fattening up the children to put them in the oven to eat!  Talk about a macabre thing to read to children.

Back to the rodents.  No, Tricia is not cutting off their tails with a butcher knife.  But it is Spring and the rats are having babies.  Lots of them.  Last year we were having a rat problem in our barn.  I was shooting them off the rafters with my .22 loaded with rat shot.  It was great fun, but I was unable to get them all.  I caught a few in a cage type trap.  You might remember I researched and saw that others were having great success catching rats in this trap that I wrote about building it in this post:  A Better Rat Trap  That trap caught exactly ZERO rats.  I don't know why it didn't, but with persistence and help from a couple of hungry cats, I was able to almost eliminate the rat problem last year, but as described above, they're back.

I resorted to an old, trusty, cheap, tried-and-true method of killing rats.  It only involves a bucket, a board, and some rice.  I've killed 6 young rats in three days and I've seen two more scurrying away as I opened the feed room, so I know there's more.  See the little critters?  No, they're not cute.  They're not sleeping either. When I open the door to the feed room and see the victims in my trap, they quickly meet their end by the end of a 2x4.  Then they are tossed out, along with the rice, for the chickens to devour.

Two Rats in the "Trap" Post Mortem

Here is the makeshift trap all set.  All it is is a bucket with rice in the bottom pushed against the wall with a board leaning against the bucket to act as a ramp.  The critters climb up the ramp, smell the rice, jump down in the bucket, eat their fill, and then realize that they cannot get out.  They jump and jump to no avail.  That's where I come in.

The one drawback to this trap: This works on young rats only.  Larger ones can jump out of the bucket.  It is amazing how high a mature rat can jump.  I've used taller buckets and caught bigger rats, but my rate of catch was never as good as the standard 5 gallon bucket on the young rats.  Probably because the younger rats are stupid and not as street-wise as the older ones, coupled with the fact that perhaps the taller your bucket, the further they have to jump down and maybe that discourages them and/or maybe the taller the bucket, the scent of the rice in the bottom is weaker and doesn't draw them in as much.  In any event, the 5 gallon bucket trap is the cat's meow (ha ha!) when it comes to rat killin'.

The trap is set

And here is a panoramic shot of the trap, showing bucket, ramp, rice and two dead rats. Lovely, isn't it? You can do this too with things you have at your house.  It works for mice as well as rats and it's great family fun.

A Panoramic view

Hey, if you can sing 3 Blind Mice to a child or read them Snow White in which the queen asks the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring back her lungs and liver in a box, you can surely teach them the very useful skill of rat killing that they'll be able to take with them into adulthood.  Rats left unchecked multiply and make a real mess, destroying property, stinking up the place, and potentially carry disease.  Happy Hunting!