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How To Make Your Home Less Attractive To Rats

    How To Make Your Home Less Attractive To Rats

    Pests are a fact of life if you are a homeowner, but if you implement the right measures, you can prevent a lot of headaches further down the line. In this article, we’re going to cover the steps you can take to make your home less attractive to rats.

    Hygiene and clutter

    While hygiene is not the main determinant when it comes to rat infestations, it is true that rats are drawn to areas that are less hygienic. Rats also love clutter. Clutter provides them with ready-made shelters and hidden pathways through the home. So if you have clutter, you are at higher risk of a rat infestation.

    Food

    One of the main reasons rats enter the home is to reach food. Rats have an excellent sense of smell, and they can smell any food in the home from outside of the building. As such, you have to make sure that all food in the home, including pet food and food that you threw away is in sealed, or at the very least lidded, containers.

    Access points

    Even if all the food was out in the open, and the house was a mess, rats couldn’t gain access if there were no access points. So to maximize the odds of preventing an infestation, you will have to remove all the potential rat access points into the building. This will require you to inspect the exterior of the home for any hole, crack or gap that is wider than 3/4th of an inch, and then seal it. You should check both the foundation and the upper levels of the home, because rats are excellent acrobats and they will scale walls or walk across electrical wires to get access to the building.

    What to do after an infestation starts

    So you’ve taken care of everything. The food is sealed, the home is clean and clutter-free, and you’ve plugged every hole in the wall that you could find. But, somehow a rat infestation is underway. At this point, your best option is to work with a pro and have the infestation removed completely. Then the pro can help you implement even stronger preventive measures to keep the rats out of the home in the future.

    For more information on how to prevent rat infestations, or if you have an infestation to be removed, contact us today.

    Contact Town & Country for a quote today!

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