Dealing With Rodents In A Country Home: What You Can Do
When you decided to live out in a lovely home in the country, you may never have imagined that you would have to deal with a rodent problem. However, living out in the country means that you are living close to wildlife, which of course, includes rodents. As such, you may have found that you have a bit of a rodent problem in or around your country home. There are many different ways to deal with rodent control when living in the country. Get to know some of these options available to you. Then, you can better handle the issue going forward.
Seal Up Your House
One of the best things you can do when you have a rodent issue in your home is to find any and all ways that the rodents are finding their way into your home. Sealing up any small gaps or holes throughout your home, including in the basement and attic can greatly reduce the number of rodents (and other pests) coming in and out of your home.
Once everything is sealed up, you only have to deal with the rodents that got trapped inside of your home in the process. This makes the rodent control and removal process quite a bit easier.
Get a Cat or Two
Cats are great hunters and they love doing it. Most cats are natural mousers, meaning it is their instinct to hunt and kill mice and other small rodents. As such, getting a cat or two for your country home would be a great way to manage your rodent problem.
The good thing about having the cats around is that they also naturally scare rodents away from your home. As such, you will be reducing populations in two ways, with the actual hunting of mice and with the sheer presence of your cats.
Be sure when you choose your cats that you select cats with their full sets of claws intact. Cats that have been declawed still have a hunting instinct but are less capable hunters because of the disability of being without their front claws.
Set Up Traps in Areas Your Cat Cannot Reach
There are some areas of the home that your cat just cannot or should not reach, such as in crawl spaces, in the basement, or in the attic. As such, it is still a good idea to set up traps in your home to catch the mice that you may have inadvertently sealed in your home and that your cat has yet to catch themselves.
Standard wooden mousetraps will do just fine for this purpose. Glue traps are inhumane (if that is a concern for you) and can leave the mouse alive for a prolonged period of time which is unsightly and unpleasant. And any poison used for killing rodents can not only kill the rodent but could kill your pets as well as other wildlife that might come into direct contact with the poison or with the rodent that ate the poison. As such, regular traditional mousetraps are your best bet.
Now that you know some of the steps you can take when dealing with rodents in your country home, you can be sure you are doing everything you can to control your rodent problem going forward.
For more information and tips for rodent control, reach out to a local pest control service.