Heavy infestation of rats is one that no household wants to experience. The mere sight of it in accommodation is as disgusting as having faeces on the dining table, the hate for rats for most families has consistently increased the urge to continue seeking ways of permanently solving rat infestation issues.
One rat in your house is equivalent to 50 others in the coming month if no strict measure is adopted to curtail it.
This is because allowing one to have its way around the house will attract another and another until it starts to breed multiple others to infest your apartment and continue with destruction.
Unfortunately, many people don’t bother checking out the number of rats in their homes to help in the decision to eliminate or send them packing… well, some could ask whether it is important to know the number in a home.
Truly this might sound funny but it’s until you can determine their number in your home that you can find the best method to deal with them.
If you find just one, you could go on to locate where it is in the house and kill it. I must also mention that killing them is the only remedy to saying goodbye to them, rats chased out of a home will eventually find their way back to the house especially if they can get food, water, and shelter in your apartment with ease. This mostly occurs in residences where the owners are hardly around to clean.
How to tell how many rats are around?
Rats are mostly out at night when humans are asleep. Although a few numbers appear in broad daylight in nearby dustbins or exposed food particles.
Smaller ones tend to come out in the daytime because catching them might be a bit difficult while the bigger ones move around at night, these are the ones that cause great destruction in the house.
Hence, to determine how many rats are in your home, the night is the best time. Here are several verified ways to ascertain the numbers.
Smells: Rats infestation comes with a pungent, musky irritating smell. This can help you to determine how many of them are present. When the smell is mild its presence is low but when the smell becomes thicker and more irritating, particularly in the kitchen area and store then you know that many of it live with you.
Droppings: This is another easy way of determining the level of a rat infestation in your home. This is also known as rat poops, it usually comes in dark brown or black pellets. The size of the droppings determines the size of the rats and the quantity. Sometimes rat urine could also help you know the age of rats’ infestation.
Destruction: The presence of a few rats in your home may not cause a lot of damage to your property compared to when there is a heavy infestation. Lots of destroyed food (raw and cooked), household furniture, and materials could be an indication of heavy infestation.
The magnitude of the destruction will also tell on the sizes of rats in the house and reveal the areas they are concentrated.
Noise: Bigger rats produce noisy and loud sounds, especially at night. They are known to communicate with squeak sounds; the sounds help send signals for regrouping or danger when the human factor sets in. Heavy sounds by rats preempt multitudes and maturity while faint sounds indicate that there is a lesser population of them.
Footprints: Footprint is one way of identifying the number of rats in your home. More footprints at a spot reveal that more of them exist while fewer footprint shows that they are not so many.
When the footprints are more in one direction you will have an idea of their possible hide out but if the footprint is scattered, it means the rats are in several areas in the house.
Sounds from The Kitchen: Obviously, rats’ attack starts from the kitchen area where the foods are kept, rats are prone to climb pots, and toggle on spoons and other kitchen utensils in search of food particles, when this happens, multiple sounds are made indicating their presence.
The sounds may be mild or heavy depending on their number at that time.
Dead Rats: Sick, unfed, or aged rats tend to drop dead occasionally, the numbers should indicate whether they are heavily infested or lowly infested in your house.
Few rat deaths mean not too many of them, while between 4 to 5 dead rats in a week reveal a heavy infestation.
Multiple Kits or Pups: Kits or pups are baby rats. The presence of these in the house is a bad sign. This means that your house is infested to a large extent.
When this is discovered great urgency must be upheld to identify the rats and make an immediate move to kill them all with no mercy to prevent multiplication and further regrouping.
Sudden Rots and Decayed Components: Big rats normally gather rotten or crushed bones, vegetables, garbage, plant remains and all forms of dirt to build their nest. If by any chance you find decayed components in your home, it’s a sign that rats are at some corner of the house, usually cold, dark, and dusty such as under the bed, in a hole, in the roof, etc.
If rats succeed in building their nest in your house, the only way to take them out is to locate where they are and kill them all, close up or destroy their nest and thoroughly clean up to keep the area neat and human-friendly.
Constant Food Spills: When one or two rats go for your food it’s likely you won’t notice unless there is evidence of droppings in the food but when more than five rats enter your pot then it’s unlikely for food particles not to be spilled on the floor.
Rats are not intelligent enough not to litter the floor with food while feasting in your pot, hence whenever you see spills of food particles on the floor of your kitchen or in any part of the room, the possibility of infestation is very high.