How to understanding in controlling of Rats by Its Habbits (poisonous baits)

By
Erwin Irawan Permana
Field Laboratory Staff of BPTP Pontianak
West Borneo, Indonesia


Rats were group in pests of rice field mostly in Indonesia, but also attacks almost everything. Here in West Borneo besides rice field, rats attacks palm tree and cocoa. Althougt its not the major pests in the plantation, but still can effect to loss of yields.

How to control rats attack there’s a lot of ways, commonly use such as traps or use a bait with poisons. Rats have a specified characters such as neophobia. Neophobia is one of the rats characters that’s need to be concern in controlled rats. If we use a baits we need to make a free bait with no poisons, because the “neophobic” so rats will not eat the baits before he can sure that the baits is save to eat. The reaction of rats if seeing something new, then it will examine the thing and mostly it will make a new trail to avoid that new thing (it is nephobia means).

Besides neophobia rats always stick on its pathway, rats will not make a different trail to move from the nest to the source of its food. That is why we can control them by looking for their tracks. An active nests is different from the nonactive nests, we can see the different from its pathway that existing near the nests. Rats also have a habbits that can help us to find their nests, rats always pee and drops their feses a long in their pathway. The smell of urine and feses of the rats can help us to put the freebait (without poisons) in their ways. Use of poison that have a chronical effects is recommended because its neophobic. If a rats dead because of an accute poison, it will makes others afraid of eating the baits.

After we put a free baits, than we monitored the free baits to make sure that the rats eat it. In free baitings we can also make a various baits, so we can know which baits that the rats prefered to eat. But in this case, we can use a baits from palm tree or cocoa. After we have the results from the freebaitings of rats, then we now go to the next steps. Firstable we need to prepare the poisons, we can make the poisons from organic material such as gadung (it’s a local fruit) that have a poisonous effects or we use a chemical posions such as choumatetralyl (we can buy it from limited chemical store or from university labs).

The organic material need to process before we can use it, my advice is we use the chemicals poisons for its simplicity to use. We can drawn the baits in a water that contains with poisons, or we can use it with the baits that we make ourselves. We can make a baits from essence of cocoa mix with wax and choumatetralyl. We cook in metal bowl to melt the wax, then we put the essence of cocoa or cheese, after that we put the poisons and stir until mix together. Before the wax goes hard, we take an ice tray then we pour that mixed wax in it. After its hard then we knock out the wax from ice tray and now we have a poisonous baits of our own. One thing that I known from my college Doctor, “Rats is color blind, its depends on their sense of smelling to identified things”. That’s for sure that we can make our own free baits, and just focused on the essence to attract rats.

Back to our discuss about controlling rats with poisonous baits. Now after we have the poisonous baits, we can starts to put the baits in rats pathways. The scenario is that one of the rats eat the baits and because its doesn’t know that the baits is poisonous so another rats will eat the baits too. The active poisons of choumatetralyl will make an effect after seven days. The symptom is very hard dehydrate from the rats, that is because this active poisons (choumatetralyl) attacks the bloods of rats by its specific form to antikoagulated the bloods. So the rats will tried to drink lot of water and that’s why the rats will dead near by the source of water.

That is what I know about rats and their habbits in the context of controlling its attacks on plantation. In other case my senior use fishery waste to attrack the rats. He use the head of shrimp waste mix with wax and poisons to baits the rats, and he succeed to controlled it. That’s why I just make an example about the baits, so we can improvize to choose the suitable ways to controlling rats in our place.

Im sorry because my english its not that good enough, but I tried to do best…
Hopefully this article helps you…