Next door started getting rats in the garden when they put a duck-pen in, and got ducks.

Next-door's Dad is a rough-and-ready outdoorsy farm-handish country type. This is what he did.

He put a humane trap down to catch a rat alive. He took that rat, and put it in a metal bin, put a metal grille over the bin and weighed that down with a housebrick. (He did all that with his bare hands which is all like super icky.)

Then he doused the rat in petrol, set that f**ker alight and let it burn to death. It screamed and screamed like nothing I've ever heard before. Noises that you would never credit coming out of a little rat. (Actually I thought it was quite big, as rats go, but he said it was little).

Now, I've no empirical evidence that the sound of a rat screaming in agony as it burns to death trapped in a metal bin is a deterrent to other rats in the nearby area, but I do know that I haven't seen a rat since. Could be coincidence. They might have had rat-tickets for Rat Easy Jet to Benidorm anyway, and were off without all that palaver. Dunno.

So you could try that. Obviously the RSPCA would probably frown on that sort of thing, but y'know. Wevs, go-gooders.

Posted By: Arizona Bay, Mar 11, 10:35:48