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While Kurt, the Fall City Rat Hunter was pretty deadly with his M-1 Carbine, it's certainly possible to do some "damage"
with smaller caliber guns as can be seen below in the note from KurtS.
Email the Fall City Rat Hunter himself and tell him your story too! ;-)
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The other story involves an infestation of five rats in another house I lived in. They came in through a foundation vent and made their way into the attic. After I discovered how they got in, I covered all the vents with hardware cloth tied with bailing wire so that not even a frog could get in or out.
Closing the rats up in my house might sound like a bad idea, but I couldn't think of how to make one way openings, and I knew that without being able to get easy access to water, they would start to make more desperate choices.
The first few I got were with rat traps. Actually, they were all caught using the traps in one form or another. My baiting method is a little involved. I use super chunk peanut butter and dental floss.
Peanut butter is great bait anyway, but rats and mice will just lick it off the trigger so gently that they will never spring the trap, and you'll just end up frustrated and feeding them something other than their last meal.
Peanut butter with big chunks of peanuts in it is another thing entirely. If you put a big gob of it on the trigger and wind a foot or so piece of floss around the trigger and the bait, you can tie down some of those chunks. No self respecting rat is going to stop halfway through a peanut butter meal when the best part is right there, and the first part only amounted to an appetizer anyway.
So I had tossed three rat carcasses in the trash when I noticed that one of them had found a way into the utility room and had gotten into the dog food. I actually heard it crawling up through the wall one day, back into the attic.
The sounds of early am rat parties in the attic had died down a lot, but I knew they were still around, and now I knew where to put the next trap.
I checked the trap one day to find it sprung with no rat in it. I didn't really expect to find the rat, but I got lucky, because the trap had broken the rat's front legs, and it couldn't get back up inside the wall to escape.
I got my CO2 BB gun and loaded it and went to kill the rat. It was behind the clothes dryer, so I climbed on top of the dryer to shoot the thing. When it saw me, it leaped about 2 feet into the air AT ME and ran out to the wall on the other side of the room.
I was a little freaked by the thing jumping at me, so I stayed on top of the dryer and shot the thing several times. That BB pistol was no slouch - it would shoot through the metal of a galvanized garbage can, but the rat would not die. I put five shots into it, head and chest, and thinking it was dead, I got down to investigate.
The thing started jumping around again, and I hopped back up on my trusty dryer and started shooting again. It took a dozen shots to finally kill it, and I got down and back up once more before it finally died.
I eventually got rid of all the rats, but not before I saw firsthand evidence of how tough they are.
So there's my two rat stories. Hopefully, I won't have any more to tell...
Regards,
Kurt
I'll give that rat credit - he went down fighting ... next time KurtS (who I also give credit for hanging n their despite the marginal firepower), pull out the heavy arty' as Kurt did with the M-1 Carbine.