Reply #31: Well anchored hardware cloth and "Great Stuff" urethane foam. [View All]

[hunter]

That's what works for me. The hardware cloth is the immediate physical barrier, but the foam blocks air flow and scents so the rats don't know if there's anything worth digging for.

Rats will chew on wood for weeks if they think there's something worthwhile on the other side.

But you don't want to seal up any places like roofs that need air flow to keep cool and dry. There you have to settle with metal and heavy wire vent hardware.

We have pet rats occasionally which makes our dogs worthless as rat catchers. We've had wild rats in our garage and I swear our dogs knew them by name. They'd greet these wild rats just like they were greeting our pet rats. "Hello, hi, how are you doing?"

Fortunately the owls and our neighborhood semi-feral cats eventually got the wild rats. We haven't had any for at least a year.

Poison is no good for a variety of reasons, the most immediate being that few things smell so bad as a big dead rat decomposing in the walls.