What's the Difference Between Pest Control and Rat Control?

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There is actually a very big difference between typical forms of pest control and rat control; the biggest one being that rat control never deal with poison, whilst pest control almost always uses poison or fumigants.



The only way to deal with rats is to trap them, and this can mean trapping to kill with snap traps, or trapping to release. The latter rarely works as a viable option because relocated rats don't usually survive for long upon release.

When poison is used to get rid of rats, an approach often taken by PEST control, the rats may or may not die. More and more rats are being tested and proving to be immune to the everyday rodenticide that you can buy from your local hardware store, and this means that you would need a lot more rat poison than usual to kill them off. In some studies, rats have shown to have somewhere close to ten and over times the amounts of rat poison in their system that it would have otherwise taken to kill them.

The poison might not kill the rats, but it will certainly make any animal that then kills and eats that rat rather sick, through a process that is known as secondary poisoning. Because the rat has, for example, ten times the amount it should have of rat poison still in the body. any animal that ingests the rat then ingests the remaining poison too. If it had been one dose of rat poison the results might not be so bad, but when immune rats have a lot of poison in the body, you have a recipe for disaster.

Always do your research when hiring someone in to get rid of pest animals, especially rats. It takes a hole just barely bigger than half an inch for rats to slip inside, and it won't just be the one rat that you'll have to contend with; there will be an entire army of them, all breeding with each other, pooping all over the place, and spreading diseases.

Go back to the Rat Removal page, or learn tips to do it yourself with my How to Get Rid of Rats guide.