Few things funner than watching a great lollopy big dog being harangued by a wee terrier. 
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Pull the steel wool and get bronze wool. The steel wool will rust very quickly, leave stains down the side of your house and break down as it rusts and in general just not hold up well.
Username checks out.
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Can’t resist… Must post…
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Unless rats are somewhat peculiar by mammalian standards, being in a confined space with dry ice is probably an ugly way to go. Sensing lack of oxygen is something that most animals(and people, which is why inert gas asphyxiation or carbon monoxide poisoning are so often lethal even in situations where the victim could have easily left for some fresh air if they had just been aware of the problem) aren’t very good at; but elevated CO2 in the blood will trigger reflexive attempts to correct the problem; which will obviously be futile and increasingly desperate in a CO2 atmosphere.
The rat would still succumb to lack of oxygen markedly faster than to the alternatives of mechanical trauma, poison, dehydration, etc. but they will likely not be happy about it. Nitrogen they would probably barely notice. Unfortunately, liquid nitrogen is a bit more of a pain to handle than dry ice is.
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I had to do that myself (to a couple rats) in college for toxicology lab. it is peaceful.
add in a few fish, and that’s all I had to kill to get through college.
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I assume it’s also a matter of temperature and overall CO2 concentration. Very high levels will kill you very fast. Three or two lungs full of pure CO2 and I guess you’ll lose consciousness immediately. A lower percentage mixture might not, and trigger said reflexes.
Being chilled to -20°C quite fast also might have quite an impact.
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On a more serious note, @jlw: could you please, please, please, with sugar on top, change the title a bit? Capital R for the rat, and italics. It’s Rattus norvegicus (Berkenhout, 1769). I don’t insist on the brackets, author and year of publication, since BB is definitely not a scientific publication. But it annoys me to no end that publishers ignore even the italics and capitalisation all of the time, all over any written media, all over the world.
It’s so embarrassing.
It really is important.
The Code seems complicated, but it really is the basis for communication about all things living. Stick to the code. Binomials, capitalised genus, italics. That’s not too much to ask, I would wager.
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New York city is investigating the use of dry ice; pour the dry ice into the burrow and as the ice melts, the rats suffocate.
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[quote=“skr1, post:55, topic:108615”]
My rats don’t take bait.[/quote]
If I had rats that didn’t eat anything I wouldn’t worry about them. Unfortunately, the rats in our neighborhood find grain, electrical wiring, and brake lines strongly compelling.
One advantage of the zapper traps is that they can work without baits, since rats will often enter out of curiosity. I think the Goodnature trap might have the same benefit.
As for the other thing, I’ve never had one of the traditional wood-and-metal snap traps not completely take out the animal. Sometimes they don’t go off, sometimes they spring prematurely, but either is preferable to a half-trapped rat or mouse or alligator.
Two more found dead this AM.
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I didn’t say they don’t eat anything. They do a number on the cacti in the nursery and the poop all over the shed if they make a house in there.
‘Jim’s Porter’
If you haven’t come across this before… enjoy!
A single cat just won’t do it. Start up a feral colony for some real rat deterrent.
Jokes aside, I remember a house in north Texas recently built atop the only hill for miles around and all the trees had been cleared for farming. When the heavy rains started, it seemed like every single bug, rat, snake, mole, squirrel, and every other critter decided to pay the house a visit. It was on the market the very next week.
Depends on the cat. My six-pound super mouser Delilah wiped out a middling large rat warren all by herself, which is how she earned her place in the family.
With the weather turning colder, we will soon have the annual field mouse invasion at my house… I suppose should spend next weekend caulking seams. 
The folks live in a very rural area. They have “barn cats” which is just a nice name for a feral colony. The population is fairly indeterminate but you can observe the seasonal and yearly changes in the colony size depending on available prey. It’s an interesting thing to watch. The colony has always been a matriarchy. Males are ejected around the time they become sexually active. When the “queen” goes in to heat so do all of the other females at which time they allow a roaming male to join the colony for a week or two. It’s like a back porch wildlife series.
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They got in our basement and ate all my ballerina wife’s pointe shoes., except the Black Swan shoes (really!)
I am a RatZapper man.
https://www.amazon.com/Rat-Zapper-Ultra-Rodent-Trap/dp/B00CM859OA/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?ie=UTF8&qid=1506994649&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=rat+zapper+ultra&psc=1
Harsh. What did they say wrong?
