posted 9 years ago
Living right next to a macadamia nut orchard, I have rats 365 days a year. But we can keep the rats under control by having cats. From experience I can say that most cats are not rat catchers. Our first cat, a declawed house cat that moved to the country life, was a great rat killer but he couldn't get up on the roof, where the rats were 90% of the time. So we gradually acquired more cats (for various reasons). Over time we got a few more great rat catchers, but honestly, most of our cats were either not interested in the job or aren't good at it. Our very best ratter is the smallest cat we own, a tiny neutered male. He's death on any rat that enters his turf. He trained two younger cats to hunt rats, so we now have a good army of rat catchers......4 good hunters, 9 couch potato types. But even those couch potatoes will chase a rat, although they don't catch them.
I prefer using cats over dogs simply because we have roof rats. A dog can't get the ones on the roof, up in a tree, eating the ripe bananas and tree fruits, walking across the electrical lines, or anywhere else that is not ground level. And besides, rats are mostly nocturnal, exactly when the dogs are sleeping. Our cats tend to prowl at night. Another plus....cats don't bark at twigs falling out of trees, cars driving by, joggers, turkeys walking in the pasture.
The two problems I considered with getting cats for rat control are...
1- most cats don't hunt rats. So I had no way of knowing in advance if the cat would become a rat hunter.
2- cats also hunt birds. In our case, we see our little hunter cat take a bird about once a month. He's terrible at it so invariably the bird is one of those slow doves. Funny how he can be so dismal with birds but a real champ with rats. One of our other cats will nail a finch about every 2-3 months. Considering we have 13 cats, that's not much impact on the bird population here. None of our cats even look at a chicken or duck.
It's never too late to start! I retired to homestead on the slopes of Mauna Loa, an active volcano. I relate snippets of my endeavor on my blog : www.kaufarmer.blogspot.com