Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-catcher | Page 2

Thus you will
have 30 traps, on each of which there is a square centre plate; you must
level the sawdust over the plate with a bit of stick, and set each trap as
fine as you can on the catch spring, so that the weight of a mouse
would set it off. They will play in the sawdust as usual, and you will
have Rats in almost every trap. You will find that this plan will capture
a great many of the Rodents. I have trapped as many as 114 in one
night in this way.
In time, however, the Rats will cease to go near sawdust. Then you
must procure a bag of fine soot from any chimney sweep, and you will
find that they will go at the soot just as keen as they did in the first
instance at the sawdust. When they get tired of soot (which they will in
time) you must procure some soft tissue paper and cut it fine, and use
that in the same way as the sawdust and the soot. You can also use light
chaff or hay seeds with the like result.
I must not omit to tell my readers to always trap Rats in the night, and
to go very quietly about it, for if you make much noise they will give
over feeding. You must not go about with too big a light whilst
trapping. You should stay at the building from dark until midnight, and
every time a Rat is caught in the trap you should go with a bull's eye
lamp, take it out of the trap or kill it, and then set the trap again, as you
have the chance of another Rat in the same trap. From experience I can
say that you need not stay in any place after 12 o'clock at night, as I
think that the first feed is the best, and that the first three hours are
worth all the other part of the night. You can go home at 12 o'clock,

and be sure to be in the place by 6 or 7 a.m., for many a Rat caught in
the trap by the front leg will, if it gets time, eat off its leg and get away
again, and they are very cunning to catch afterwards.

NEVER HAVE YOUR TRAPS SET IN THE DAYTIME.
Handle them as little as possible. Always catch as many Rats as you
can in your buildings in January and February, as they begin to breed in
March, and every bitch Rat means, on the average, eight more. Also get
as much ferreting done as possible before breeding time, for a young
Rat can get into the ends of the joisting under a floor, where a ferret
cannot get near it, and the consequence is that a ferret is unable to cope
with its task. The best thing I can advise for clearing young Rats is a
good cat, one that must not be handled nor made a pet of, but allowed
to live in almost a wild state. A good cat can do as much, in my opinion,
in one night, when Rats are breeding, as two ferrets can do in a day,
especially in a building where there are cavity walls, as it is impossible
for a ferret to follow a Rat in such walls.
This is all the information I am able to give on the trapping of Rats--a
method I have proved by 25 years' experience to excel all others. Still
another way of clearing the pests is as follows:--The majority of Rats
are Black, or what we call Drain Rats; if they are in a building they will
in most cases come from a water-closet. Sometimes you will see from
the drain pipes in the water-closet, say, a six-inch pipe fitted into a
nine-inch pipe, and the joint covered round with clay, through which
the Rats eat and scratch and get into the building in great numbers in
the night, but most of them return into the drains during the day. Now,
if it is the breeding season (about eight months out of the twelve) they
will do much damage to silk, cotton, leather, lace, and, in fact, all other
light goods. And one would be surprised to see the quantity of cloth,
paper, etc., they will procure for their nests whilst breeding.
The way to get clear of these is to go in the day with two or three
ferrets and leave the drain pipe open. Ferret them all back into the drain;
don't put a net over the drain for fear you might miss one or two. If they

got back into the building they would be hard to catch, as they would
not face the net