Rats!!

[Scythe13]

Gorse - £0.00 if collected from the wild. Trust me with this. In the Victorian era they used to use gorse to stop rats getting into barns and attacking food stocks. It really works. Just chop a load and lay it to stop them going over it. Best used stuffed into rat holes and placed around areas you don't want them in. Only issue will be if you surround your house/barn/whatever, you'll not get new ones coming in, but you'll also be trapping the current ones you have into the vicinity.

Guns, poison, traps, snares, whatever…I shoot over 50 rats a week, and there is still plenty more where they came from. One gram of prevention is worth more than a tonne of cure…or a tonne of rat poison.

The ones that are trapped, a whippet, jack russel, or other farm dog would be a good place to start. For the guns, you'll hardly find many out in the day. If they are, then they're very gutsy. For a gun you'll need a night vision system too. Pretty much any air rifle, whether .177 or .22, it doesn't matter. I've used both and neither has made a rat more dead than the other. As for power, it doesn't take a load of power to take out a rat. 6ft/lb would do it fine. But I use my 9ft/lbs Crosman 2250 indoors, and outdoors. But if going longer range, I go with a stronger springer, closer to 12ft/lbs (the legal limit for non-FAC air rifles).

Personally, if I didn't have the rifle and set up I have, bare in mind I hate dogs (even though we have 3) I'd gorse it up, then set bait boxes down. Check them daily, keep them topped up. Put them near rat holes. Then relax. Either that or I'd get the gorse in place and borrow a friend's ratting dog or ferret, and do it that way.

An interesting note, if you catch 4 or 5 rats and lock them in a relatively small blacked out container together, and starve them of food, they will eventually eat each other, until only 1 rat is left alive. This one rat has then produced cannibalistic tendencies, and if added to a rat infested area, will start killing and eating all the other rats. No joke, it will favour eating other rats, than eating any other food in it's path. Sounds sick, but it works.