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Transcripts:
How to Locate & Eliminate Rodents In The Attic
Scott McGrath:
The old saying here in Houston is not if you get rats, but when you get rats.
Hey, I am Scott McGrath and I do own McGrath Pest Control. Every day we get people that call us because they hear little scratching somewhere upstairs or in their ceiling. They’re not sure what it is, so they give me a call.
First thing I do, I need to come out to their house, ask them a bunch of questions. What are you hearing? What time of day are you hearing it? Hearing it in the daytime, nighttime? Because that kind of tells me an idea of what may be going on. The next thing I need to do is I need to go upstairs in their attic and figure out exactly what they’re having an issue with. So let’s go in the attic and let’s find out.
So now we’re in an attic and the first thing I’m looking for are little burrow holes in the insulation. Typically, rodents when they’re in an attic, they’re going to make little burrow holes all through the insulation to maybe put their nesting or all their food and stuff in there.
So the first thing I do, I look around. And oh, look, I see a hole like that. That tells me that there are rats, or at least could be rats, or at one time was rats in an attic. So that is a good telltale sign right there that a person has rodent activity in their attic.
And there’s a couple things that we can find when we’re in here. It’s either going to be squirrels, it could be raccoons, it could be rodents. More than likely, it’s always either squirrels or rodents that you hear in an attic.
If it is a squirrel, that’s a little bit different because we have to figure out where they’re getting in from. And then we typically set up a one-way door on the outside to where they can leave and they can’t get back in. And then once they leave, then we seal up that hole.
Now if it’s rats, that’s a totally different process. A lot of people, they go to the store and they buy little things like this. Now this is a snap trap, but this is more for a mouse, not a rodent. A rodent snap trap is going to be a big, big, big snap trap. Okay? So we’ll put these all in the attic. We kind of find their trails and we’ll put these kind of perpendicular to their trails.
We bait it with some peanut butter. Now, it doesn’t matter what brand of peanut butter it is. Just any kind of peanut butter will work and we smear it on there. The rats will go, smell it, and then they get trapped, and then we can take them out of here.
Now, one misconception is a lot of people ask me, “Well, why don’t we just put rodent bait in an attic? And doesn’t that kill the rat?” I said, “100% it does kill the rat.” The problem is it doesn’t make them thirsty. It kind of makes them bleed to death on the inside because the rodent bait is an anticoagulant.
So yes, the rodent will eat the bait and then they’re going to off and die somewhere. They’re not going to die here. They’re going to die probably over here in that corner, that far corner that you can’t see. And then they’re going to stink, stink, stink. Okay? And we’re not going to be able to get to them because we can’t get to that part of the attic.
And so when they do die and they start stinking, it’s going to stink for weeks at a time. Then you get flies that come in the attic or get into your house. And so it just creates a big problem. So that’s why we always use snap traps, because at least yes, it will kill the rat, but yet we know where it is and we can take care of it before something happens.
So what you’re seeing right now is the soffit of a house. So that’s typically where rodents like to enter a house if they have an issue or a problem. So now that we’ve identified you have a rat problem, we’ve set snap traps up in the attic to kill them, make sure there’s none up there. Now we have to make sure they can’t get back into your house. And that soffit that you were just looking at, that’s one of the great areas that they will get into.
All they need is a quarter size hole to enter in your house. That’s it. It’s about this size. See, they don’t have a collarbone, so they can able to manipulate their body to squeeze into a small little hole. So we have to seal up those areas.
Now, some other areas that we see a lot of times that rats will get into will be garage door jambs. So in the corners of the edges of the garage, a lot of times you’ll see that it’s open. Now you’ll notice this one is all sealed up because they may have had a prior issue at some point. So we can seal that up to keep them from getting in the garage.
There’s another area through the walkthrough garage that we need to make sure that they can’t get in as well. So we’ll put a trim or something around there to keep them from getting into the garage, climb up the side of the garage, go through the breezeway to get into your attic.
So another point of entry that we see that rats get into all the time a house is right here where these AC lines come into the house. So a lot of times they’ll be climbing up here. They’ll chew through here. They’ll get into this little crack or crevice right here. They climb up the pipes and get into the attic and that’s where they stay. So this is one area that we can come and we can seal up, make sure they can’t get back in.
Now, the last thing that we can do around your house to make sure you don’t have rats around your property are these rodent bait stations right here. Now these are tamper-proof rodent bait stations. They are designed to keep domestic animals and people out of there.
Now there is rodent bait in there and the rats, like I said earlier, will eat that bait. They will die and so they’ll go and they’ll die somewhere around the yard. So this is another thing that we can do, or pest control operators can do, to help keep rats away from your property.
All right. So that being said, the old saying here in Houston is not if you get rats, but when you get rats. Rats are everywhere in Houston. Doesn’t mean you’re dirty or anything. It’s just part of being in Houston. Now, the bad thing about that is they will go inside, they will chew wires, they will urinate in there, they will defecate in there. They will have all kinds of diseases in your attic and they will cause all kinds of havoc health-wise in your house.
So don’t do it yourself. Don’t try and go do something yourself that you have no idea what you’re doing or you’re not doing the best method. Call someone like me, a professional, Scott McGrath, McGrath Pest Control. We know what we’re doing. We know how to take care of the problem and we know how to prevent it from coming on.
