About Rats
Rats are medium-sized rodents who have slender tails that originated in Asia and Australia but now live worldwide. Rats vary from mice in many things: they are bigger, have longer, thinner bodies, and longer legs. Rats can be little – about 5 inches long – or enormous – approximately the size of a large house cat and weighing five pounds or more.
Habits
Rats are reckless chewers and are known to chew through a variety of materials, including soft concrete, wood, plastic, metal, and cinder blocks.
Part of their need to chew stems from the fact that their teeth never stop developing. Rats must continually bite to wear down their teeth in order to keep them from getting excessively long, making feeding difficult.
Habitats
Rats may be found on every continent. The rice-field rat, for example, may be found in Southeast Asia, the Australian swamp rat in Eastern Australia, and the Norway rat, often known as brown rats, on every continent except Antarctica. Mice are robust and frugal animals. That is why they reproduce so fast and may be found all over the planet. However, they prefer some areas of your home over others. Mice prefer to live in places with good ventilation and food. They come inside to avoid the cold, predators, and the food you’ve inadvertently left out for them.
Threats
Brown rats give birth to up to 2,000 kids in a single year, with up to 22 young in a single litter, while female rats can mate up to 500 times in only six hours. They have a gestation period of a month, though populations might swiftly outgrow control. Increasing rat populations puts you at danger of catching diseases spread by rodents. Rats are notorious for spreading a wide range of illnesses. They’ve lately been discovered to be Hepatitis E carriers, infecting others with the virus. Many of them are infected with typhus.
Prevention
The list for preventing rats is quite similar to the list for preventing mice. Use foam filler to fill up any gaps around the house. Keep any pet food, garbage cans, and spare bird feeders out of the reach of rodents. If you already have rats, all but one or two access holes should be sealed. They’ll merely produce additional holes if you seal them in. Then, outside the one or two escape holes you left, set traps. Make sure you have an anti-rodent barrier in place to keep them out of your drains and out of your bathroom via the toilet. Keep your garden free of dog waste, food leftovers, and woodpiles to keep them away. Bait can be used instead of traps in the garden.
