Rat trouble!

suki1964

Trouble is feeding the birds WILL attract rats - simple.

Your council may or may not come out - usually depending on if you own your house or not - council properties they HAVE to attend - home ownership - they can charge (through the nose as well)

You can bet your bottom dollar that where there's one rat - there's more.

When we had the same problem with rats coming into our garden to get the bird food from the drains three houses down, not only did we have to put down poison, but the whole block did, and we all also had to stop feeding the birds till the rats were eradicated

I know how much you want to feed the birds,perhaps like I do you can put feeders up in the park or from trees in the road? ( I put them up in the local forest)

mrcol1000

Mutter wrote: »

Quote:
Originally Posted by mrcol1000
"I would suggest you stop putting food down for birds. If your placing food on the ground this is illegal and if your neighbours complain about you doing this you could get in trouble."

Puttting food out for ground feeding birds is most certainly not illegal. What utter tosh.

Whether the feeding of ground birds attracts Rats, no idea!

Prevention of Damage by Pests Act 1949 Section 4 without boring you with the legal jargon bascially says that you must not do anything to attract or provide a home for rats and if you find rats on your land you must get rid of them. Failure to follow this legislation is a criminal offence. If you do a search on the internet your find plently of people who have been prosecuted for feeding birds.
If you place bread on the ground then your attracting rats. Sadly as much as people tell rats the bread is for birds they never listen. The reason there is so many rats is because of people who drop food waste.
I am not saying people shouldn't feed birds and I have a bird feeder but throwing bread on the ground is just going to attract rats and once they eat that food they will be looking for further sources of food. If you call Pest Control they will tell you not to put bread on the ground and may refuse to make treatment without you doing this as it would be pointless. Its amazing the number of people who feed birds this way who complain they have rats in their garden.
Anyway you can use all the lethal and non-lethal methods you want to get rid of the rats but if you keep feeding them then they and their buddies will keep coming back. Your just wasting your money.

LittleTinker

Hmmm....Ive had a look at that Act and I can see where it says people have a duty to control substancial numbers of rats......I cant see anything that says you cant feed the birds in your own garden.

If you werent allowed food on the floor at all, how do they control the feeding of ducks or pigeons?

It is only when there are a substancial number of rats that the Act comes into play.

mrcol1000

Section 4 requires all landowners and tenants to ensure they don't attract mice and rats and if they do have mice or rats they get rid of them. You don't need any mice or rats to have to solve a problem. For instance if you had an old sofa in your garden rotting away and refused to get rid of it then the council could use section 4 to order you to get rid of it because rats could make a nest out of it.
You can argue all you want about the wording and legality but the orginal poster answered their own question when they asked how they could stop rats taking food they had put down for birds. If people are happy to have rats running around their gardens then by all means throw bread down for birds but if I was living next to someone who did that and I saw a rat on my property because of it I'd soon tell them to stop it.
The problem with all these things is unless you live isolated away from everyone else its the people who around you suffer too.

treliac

We've not seen the rat for the past couple of days. We put a motion sensor, sound repeller device in the garden. Also OH chased out in the garden making a lot of noise at it . It ran off and hasn't returned. Maybe a combination of the two, I don't know. I feel a bit sorry for it really, it's only trying to survive as we all do.

Before that happened, I was watching it out of the window, running out from under next door's shed and taking food from their lawn. There were some pigeons that seemed to be chasing it away and which it was frightened of. It had appeared to chase after the blackbirds and starlings feeding in our garden and I found it quite interesting to watch.

Anyhow, it's gone off in the other direction now. Neighbours on the other side feed the birds too. It's just as well we're all animal lovers round here. There won't be anyone threatening anyone else! And if rats do become an ongoing problem, I'm sure we'll work out the best way to deal with them.

Thanks for everyone's interest and the humane suggestions.

LittleTinker

mrcol1000 wrote: »

Section 4 requires all landowners and tenants to ensure they don't attract mice and rats and if they do have mice or rats they get rid of them. You don't need any mice or rats to have to solve a problem. For instance if you had an old sofa in your garden rotting away and refused to get rid of it then the council could use section 4 to order you to get rid of it because rats could make a nest out of it.
You can argue all you want about the wording and legality but the orginal poster answered their own question when they asked how they could stop rats taking food they had put down for birds. If people are happy to have rats running around their gardens then by all means throw bread down for birds but if I was living next to someone who did that and I saw a rat on my property because of it I'd soon tell them to stop it.
The problem with all these things is unless you live isolated away from everyone else its the people who around you suffer too.

That simply is not correct.

A rat will house anywhere......not just in an old sofa......he might house under your decking for instance!! Are you seriously sujesting that the coucil are going to enforce removal of your decking because a rat is spotted running in and out from time to time?

No...they wont. You want to do some more research. They would want to sort it out if it became a serious problem.....ie a SUBSTANCIAL threat to public health.

You really think the coucil are bothered about every single rat that runs around? No! There are millions and millions of the things.

treliac

Apparently rats are clean creatures and not what some would have us believe. There are similarities between humans and rats that make us more likely to catch the same diseases from them rather than, say from cats, though. It is this that has probably given them their bad name.

My son tells me that Kenneth Grahame wrote about Ratty in 'Wind in the Willows', in a sympathetic way, with a hope of dispelling the myth about rats.

Mutter_2

mrcol1000 wrote: »

Prevention of Damage by Pests Act 1949 Section 4 without boring you with the legal jargon bascially says that you must not do anything to attract or provide a home for rats and if you find rats on your land you must get rid of them. Failure to follow this legislation is a criminal offence. If you do a search on the internet your find plently of people who have been prosecuted for feeding birds.
If you place bread on the ground then your attracting rats. Sadly as much as people tell rats the bread is for birds they never listen. The reason there is so many rats is because of people who drop food waste.
I am not saying people shouldn't feed birds and I have a bird feeder but throwing bread on the ground is just going to attract rats and once they eat that food they will be looking for further sources of food. If you call Pest Control they will tell you not to put bread on the ground and may refuse to make treatment without you doing this as it would be pointless. Its amazing the number of people who feed birds this way who complain they have rats in their garden.
Anyway you can use all the lethal and non-lethal methods you want to get rid of the rats but if you keep feeding them then they and their buddies will keep coming back. Your just wasting your money.

You may quote to your hearts content.
The Rats were there anyway, the food just brings them into the open to be seen.
Do you really think that a bit of bird food increases the Rat population?
Have you ever seen Rats around a grain store? Thousands of them, millions maybe. Indiscernible as individuals, just one mad, crazy seething mass.
Oh and the main cause of increasing rat population* is apparently, take away food and its debris.
* More like slacking standards, fewer bin collections etc.

suki1964

treliac wrote: »

Apparently rats are clean creatures and not what some would have us believe. There are similarities between humans and rats that make us more likely to catch the same diseases from them rather than, say from cats, though. It is this that has probably given them their bad name.

My son tells me that Kenneth Grahame wrote about Ratty in 'Wind in the Willows', in a sympathetic way, with a hope of dispelling the myth about rats.

Unfortunately rat are carriers of weils disease which is very nasty so you really dont want wild rats on your property, esp if you have pets who use the garden or children.

However rats do make the most fantastic pets, very clean and smart. Just they pee everywhere and tend to chew. My two managed to eat their way through my sofa and all the wiring behind the unit that house tv,video,sky etc :rotfl: DH was not amused

treliac

Yes, I know about weils disease (or leptospirosis) - my husband's grandfather died from it after falling into a water filled bomb shaft many years ago.

A link to the website http://www.leptospirosis.org/topic.php?t=31 shows that it is contracted through water-borne infection rather than air-borne.

'The bacteria are not generally airborne, so the only risks for breathing in the infection are where water droplets are being created - such as pressure-washing work or in the spray chambers of some air conditioning plant. Being "generally close" to an infected person or animal will not cause an infection!'

When my children were very small and at the crawling stage, we had a cat that used to bring his kill into the garden - there was a river at the back. I used to be frantic about the risk, but they were fine. I think, if you take reasonable precautions, the risk is fairly minimal.