One thing about the tropics is that there are lots and lots of rats.  Lots.  Everywhere.  If there is a fruit tree, there are rats living nearby.  If there is a trashcan, rats live nearby.  Even if you don’t think there are, rats are living nearby.  Same with cockroaches, but that is another story for another day.

The rats not only eat baby turkeys and fruit, they also chew thru everything including putting holes in walls and opening every container in your shed to find out what is inside or even try to chew through your screens.  They poop and pee and make a gross mess wherever they live and they also carry fleas and diseases like Leptospirosis.

Rat Holes in Old House                                       Rat Holes in Chicken Coop

The common response from many locals on how to deal with this problem is to use poison.  When we first moved here and our abandoned wood house had rats living in the walls I decided I would use some poison on them per this advice.  It turned out to be pretty sad.  The poison makes them sick and when they come out of their hiding spot you are confronted with a sick suffering animal, but I was told at least they don’t die in the walls.  Having poison around our chickens we figure is a bad idea because that is one of OUR sources of food too and I don’t want to eat poison. Plus the rats are pretty smart and will eventually stop eating the poison!

So not only are the poisons toxic and inhumane to the mammals that ingest them ( including dogs, cats, and humans ) many rodenticides present a secondary risk to animals that hunt or scavenge the dead corpses of rats.  The owls and the hawks.   So we decided to keep poison out of our environment as much as possible.

We do have a cat, but he is little use against the rats. He is pretty much afraid of them.  I would be too, they are almost as big as he is.  He does sometimes get the little ones.

Kitty with his baby rat (or mouse?) kill

After we lost a few baby turkeys to rats however, the war was on.  I purchased a .22 caliber pellet gun (1000 fps) and a few rat traps.  When I was a kid I had a bb gun, so again this is another skill I was able to employ here!  Plus the pellet gun doesn’t fall under firearm restrictions. No license needed, no fuss.  It is accurate from as far as the scope works (40 yards-ish), a better scope would only make things better.  It is not a toy. These pellet guns are the preferred tool for hunting the invasive iguanas…yet another varmint story for another day.

Hunting Mongoose From Upon High

Rats are smart, resourceful and nocturnal which makes them actually fairly difficult to hunt.  Occasionally you will see one out during the day, but it is the mongoose who are usually out during daylight hours stealing our chicken eggs and bothering the turkeys on their nest of eggs (and other birds of Puerto Rico)…yet again another story.

As for the rats however, night hunting makes things more difficult. So I have a head lamp used for spelunking that works great.  It allows me to look around for a target on the ground or in a tree and then I can also use the scope on the rifle to hit the target.  It works really well and is actually kind of interesting in a video game kind of way.  Which was another training as a kid I received;  I played a lot of first person shooters that required scopes and sneaking.

The rats at first were fairly easy to shoot.  This gun is very accurate and very powerful and it is over pretty quickly for the rats.  The pellets usually go in one side and right out the other.  Then the next day I go out to recover them in the daylight.  If you don’t recover them, they stink for a day or two until the ants clean up the scene.

Huuuge Rat

After a while the rats tend to catch on to what is happening.  They see a few of their friends get whacked and suddenly their open behavior changes.  They start to hide, they sneak and they become aware that the sounds they make, and their movements attract unwanted attention.  They will also learn how traps work and avoid them.  So multiple techniques need to be employed.  I know I am not going to get rid of all of them, but if they are at least afraid of humans they tend to stay away from our immediate vicinity which is really all I am after.

Night rat hunting

Chasing down a rat at night in the jungle under the stars and moon watching the visible perfumed pollen move thru the light of the headlamp is actually a fun game.  They will run in the shadows of the tree limbs (on the opposite side) which makes them nearly impossible to shoot….. Unless you make an interesting noise ~squeak~ and they will peak out their head to see what the noise is and THWAP!!  It’s over.

Here’s a little audio of when Cassie came out rat hunting with me one night.

THWAP!

A night rat’s last night

There have been a lot of interesting scenarios play out, for instance one ran past a rock and I know it was  hiding so I make my ~squeak~ noise while aimed on the edge of the rock.  They will sometimes peek out with their ears at full attention.  THWAP!!! and they fall over backwards with an instant death from a well delivered headshot.

Rats’ underground hideout below the chicken coop

The ones that don’t die instantly will scream to their friends and at that point it is impossible to find any more for the night.  Their alert to others sends them back into their underground holes so an accurate death shot is important if you want to get multiple kills in a night, plus it is more humane.  They die almost instantly.  Hence the need for a powerful and accurate rifle to put them down quick.

They often scurry out of the chicken coop at night

I think many would consider this bizzare, especially if you haven’t lived in the country, but I wanted to share some of the dirtier sides of tropical life.  I choose to look at it as a fun challenge even though I do not enjoy killing things and would prefer not to.

Living here really has helped me to see the cycle of life and death and how everything is connected. We have chickens and turkeys and fruit growing to feed us, but that means food for other animals like the rats. So if we want to keep our chickens, turkeys and fruit, and not get diseases and other unwanted effects from these pests we have to keep the scale tipped to our favor. Here we are an intimate part of nature and the food chain, not excluded. And in reality none of us truly are ever excluded, we just may not see what goes on behind the scenes.