TRAPPING RATS
There is no pest around the farm yard or barn yard anywhere so hard to cope with when once they get a foothold, as rats. Finding them numerous in the barn once, we put chicken feed in the uncemented cellar of the house. Before the end of the first winter of that arrangement we were praying for a visit from the Pied Piper. The rats took possession. They broke dishes, seemingly for the fun of it; they gnawed the softened woodwork around the kitchen sink and held high carnival at midnight throughout the spaces between the walls; they all but bit the babies in their cradles and defied all our efforts to outwit them. Traps, cats, poison, we tried everything, but they outstayed us. If ever we get into a like case again I shall be tempted to try ferrets or cyanide.
Some people are successful trappers of rats, and these suggestions come from them. Set a trap in a pan of meal or bran, cover with same and put it in a runway. Make the runway easy to pass through by placing boards or boxes along near the walls. Cover a trap with thin brown paper or cloth and set it in the runway. Smoke the trap over the fire and heat it hot (not hot enough to draw the temper of the steel), after each setting. Change the place of the trap very often. Wear gloves to keep the odour of your hands from the trap. The rat is the very wisest of all his family, his behaviour seems to be the result of impish intelligence rather than mere instinct for self-preservation.
No true sportsman will allow his antipathy to rats or weasels to lead him to commit acts of cruelty. Fighting them with their own methods makes you into a human rat or weasel.