I go out to the freezer everyday to take out meat or maybe veg to defrost for the dinner the next day.
Yesterday evening while doing this task, I was met with three large (well fed) rats rushing out of the shed.
And when I opened the freezer, I discovered that the food at the top was starting to defrost. Arghh! The freezer wasn't working!
After some detective work, I discovered that the sockets didn't work rather than the freezer itself. The electric fence used for our neighbours cattle had tripped the fuse, which I plugged out. I went to the outdoor fuse board, located high up in the chickens shed and flicked down the switches and the freezer fired up again. I pushed the turbo switch on the freezer to quickly freeze the contents.
I sighed with relief as the freezer contains a great deal of food but thankfully we didn't loose any.
Once I got the freezer sorted, I lay rat poison safely in the shed. They are inevitable when you have poultry but I want to keep their population as low as possible. I reckon they have been stealing plenty of eggs from the hen house.
Our two kittens are growing well and have unfortunately started to catch small sparrows. But hopefully they will be good rat catchers in time.
Hi Marie, I've had to poison rats at times, recently I've discovered round poison blocks with a small hole through the centre. You can gently tack them to a scrap of wood so the rats can't remove them. They have to nibble off the block rather then removing it. Rats will sometimes take multiple blocks and store them away, using lots of poison and creating a pile in their runs. I found its taken a third the amount to get rid of them. Hopefully your cats will get up to the task in time anyway, mine prefers lounging :0
ReplyDeleteThat's a great idea. I was worried about them moving the poison to a dangerous area where cats/dogs/chickens might get it.
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