We’ve just discovered, in the last couple of days, that some rats (Rats! Rats! F-ing rats with…aw, forget it) have moved into our attic, and maybe even down some walls.
So I’m wondering, has anyone ever used those sonic repeller as seen on TV thingies? If so, have they worked?
I’d so very much like it if the rats would leave.
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Call a professional killer. Immediately.
i’m afraid you’re going to have to get a fumigator. but then you won’t have to worry about termites. but the good news is, you’ll only have to be out of your house for like… three days?
but you get a neato tent for your house!
Those sonic things are a pile of crap. What you need is poison.
We had mice, got the thiggie, and we haven’t seen the mice since….but it took a good month before they went away so I’m not sure you’re willing to wait that long.
They work … barely. You need an army of them to make any progress, and they sort of move out when they get sick of it, which can take a LONG time.
You might as well give it a shot as they are pretty cheap, but you will probably have to call a professional.
Just found the instructions of the sonic repeller: they say it’s not effective by itself to get rid of rats and should be used “in an integrated pest management program”. heh
Get a cat! Remember the nursery rhyme?
“This is the cat, that killed the rat, that are the malt, that lay in the house that Wil built!”
Seems to me there’s something about cows with crumpled horns and maidens forlorn, but you needn’t take it that far if alls you gots is rats.
My great-aunt had rats in her house. Those sonic “as seen on tv” things are a pile of crap. They don’t work at all. She had mice in her walls, basement, and attic, and the numbers definately did not go down any. She didn’t get rid of them until she called a professional exterminator and payed through the roof.
But, she’s been rat-free for about two years now, so paying was worth it!!!!
Good luck!
I’ve found my singing to be a sonic repellent (repellant?)…I’m going to try to drive mine away by singing Copacabana and What A Feeling…and possibly a medley of the two.
Wil,
My parents used those when they found two mice in their house and the mice disappeared! They also say that there hasn’t been a spider or bug around lately either.
Just what I know, hope it helps!
—ok this topic i can handle way better!
me being serious doesn’t always come out right- i get all worked up and type way too fast–
— sonic thingy- well unless that’s your version of leaving out a combo meal w/ poison in it, I basically would bother. didn’t I read once that you like CAts! better get a new one
— Those glue traps work pretty cool too
— Poison-
— yess – lots of poison works
–but if you have the money to spend – i vote for the cool house tent and 3 day vay’ cay’
I know some people like to be humane…
but poison works a lot better. It’s not like the rats are trying to be nice to you by inhabiting your attic.
My parents put our cat in the attic over night and the furry fellow got em. Purfectly natural.
Coming from one who has lived in the proverbial cabin in the woods… the sonic things don’t work for anything larger than a mouse.
Hire a professional ASAP.
Wil,
My advice would be to invest in some smart bombs. Send the wife and kids away for a day, then strategically set the bombs to go off in several of the rats’ suspected strongholds. You won’t get the head rat, since he’ll have since infiltrated and subverted the denizens of your neighbors’ house, but you should be able to kill at least a significant number of the innocent rats, who were probably living there and minding their own business long ago before being brainwashed by the head rat. In any case, those you don’t kill directly will soon be starved to death.
Those who live by the sword of sarcasm…
Those things do not work.
They make great nightlights in the kitchen though.
ACK! all these heartless, inhumane comments!
i realize undomesticated rats can be pretty violent and inconsiderate, but just for the record i want you all to know that i have a 2 year old pet rat who is VERY sweet. . .he has never bitten anybody, and hardly ever has an accident outside his cage. he even licks my fingers if they have water on ’em or smell like food!
oh, to be a lonely vegetarian pacifist, killing time at work on a saturday evening. . .
aww you can’t kill rats. They are innocent. LOL Jk. I’m sorry. how about getting a cat and sending it up into the attic? I’ll send you mine. He a nasty bastard. He’ll kill them. I just realize I can have a rather nasty side.
Chris: You’re no Spudnuts, but keep trying. You have definite potential!
Re: Rats…. Um, yeah. Terriers were originally bred to hunt rats, but I don’t know how well they’d climb around in the walls. I suspect that the easiest and fastest way to get rid of them is to either burn the house down, or get an exterminator.
The exterminator is probably cheaper in the long run.
You have our sincere sympathy. When we moved into our house, we had mice. A combination of De-con, and covering the hole in the wall they were coming in through with a piece of sheet metal worked great. Good Luck.
Wil,
It’s Rich from the office (I don’t think I should say the name of the co.). My friend at ICM was raving about how cool your website was, so I had to check it out – and my impression: a breath of fresh, umcompromising, honest air from someone who has experienced a lot of success in life in an industry who is desperately afraid of telling people what they really think. Not suprisingly, I especailly like ready about your audition experiences and quoting the phrase “my rockin’ managers”. It is very clear to me why my boss (again I don’t think I should say the name) speaks so highly of you. Have a great weekend and I’m sure I’ll speak to you on Monday.
Rich
PS. my hotmail account is up there beacause my company email is not working yet.
Wil! You have a dog, right? If you love her, in the name of all things holy, DO NOT try to poison these rats. Most rat poisons contain warfarin, a pretty brutal anticoagulent. If one of these poisoned rats were to die in, oh, say, the back yard, and Ferris got hold of it, she’d probably hemmorhage internally before you got her to the vet. Nasty stuff. Anyway, unless they’re huge buggers, plain ol’ spring traps usually do the trick.
Try to stay away from poisons, what with kids and pets and all.
Hi Wil,
I have one of those sonic things. Where I live big ugly palmetto bugs are the problem. The sonic thing seems to work. I don’t see those unwelcome critters anymore.
I feel your pain with the rats. I have also had fruit rats and a possum in the attic. They are NOISY! Make sure you have grating (screening)over the ducts that run outside your house and up to the attic (the electric wires pass through there). But, don’t make the mistake we did. We put the grating on while the possum was in the attic (we thought he was gone). You wouldn’t believe the racket when that guy was trying to get out.
Good Luck!
Sharon
With Ferris and cats (if you do have cats), it may not be a good idea to lay out poison. Even if it’s in places your pets can’t reach, a rat may eat the poison, and die in a place that your pets can reach.
I have no Idea about the Sonic thing, but an exterminator is probably your best bet. Only thing is, you’ll have to find a place where your family and your pets can stay while it’s being fumigated.
Act as fast as possible, rats can multiply at a very alarming rate.
JSc,
You know I really wasn’t interested in making this a sizist conversation, but I suppose with some men that’s inevitable. In terms of your positively ludicrous suggestion to burn the house down, you should realize that recommending the infantile “last resort” of flaming shows you to be no more than should be expected from your derogatory comment about my own dimensions. Not even a dirty rotten rat deserves to spoken to with anything less than the utmost respect. As for exterminators in general, I’d go tell them all to f*** themselves.
Go with a cat. Or Christopher Walken.
Wil,
The “Rats! Rats! F__king huge rats with … ” bit that you began quoting is killing me … I _cannot_ place it no matter how much I try.
Where does it come from, again? Please end my torment!
Mike
Well, there is a certain poison, that you can buy at a feed store ( for the life of me cant remember the name) you tear a tiny whole in the bag and toss it into the attic preferably in places noone goes into. The stuff makes them leave and die, so they dont die in your walls. Il try to remember the name. Sorry, its late here, had physical therapy on my knee all day, minds a little twisted. As well as staring at my computer screen looking at editing for the book :{… Oh well… like i said, I will think of the name.
— Guess that funny looking tent and 3 day Vay’ Cay’ is looking really cool right about now, huh.
i don’t approve of th poison either but whe those damn things chew through your wires when you have just finished updating you site yet it hasn’t saved yet there by causing you lose everything!! you’ll be wishing you you had poisoned the basters then.
Dont leave poison traps they got humane ones. I’m not even really saying that cuz I’m anti rat murder I’m just saying the poisons are dangerous for your kids and pets health. I mean I had a cat back in the old house and she used to catch mice. EWWWWWW!!! It totally grossed me out but it did work. If you are gonna fumigate the whole house, I’m sure that will work but keep inn mind that even if it takes three days before you can go back in you house, Ferris may have to wait a while longer. It still might effect him a but and to be on the safe side I wouldnt put the poor doggie back in the house yet until its clear.
“The head Rat”…hahahaha
Maybe if I find the head rat, the other rats will all leave?
No fears about poison. Two of my dogs died when I was a kid, because they ate snail poison.
Poison BAD. Napster GOOD!
And one of my friends had numerous pet rats, and I loved each and every one of them. Except Bailey. She was a little bitch who always bit me.
But Nuts was rad.
This is why I just want to encourage them to leave, rather than killing them.
Hey, I just realized, if there’s anyone reading this who is *still* laboring under the mistaken impression that I consider myself a celebrity, I hope you’ve realized how very, very wrong you are. 🙂
My roomate works at a pest-control company. We had the same problem; tons of rats in our house. The only thing you should do is get rat traps, it’s the best and easiest way to get rid of them.
Yeah, the head rat thing is true. They’re a little bigger and smarter than the other rats and they live away from the others. It’s an odd thing.
But those sonic things don’t work from what my friend said. They’re as good as yelling at them.
Mike: it’s from a Dirty Johnny joke…
The teacher goes through the alphabet, asking kids to say something that begins with the letter “A”, then “B”, etc.
Each time she calls out a letter, Dirty Johnny thrusts his hand into the air, and excitedly waves it around.
She doesn’t call on him for “A”, “B”, “C”, “D”…knowing that he can have a naughty thing to say for that letter…until she gets to “R”.
Johnny’s hand shoots up into the air, and she thinks to herself, “Well, there’s nothing that he can say for ‘R’,” and she calls on him.
“Johnny, what would you like to say for ‘R’?”
Dirty Johnny shouts out, “RATS! RATS! Fuckin’ Rats! With dicks *this* big!”
Thank you, thank you. I’m here all night, folks. Tip your waitress.
ive gone through a couple of seasons of mice, and i always use a couple of these traps, i think you should check them out – i figured a nice boy like you wouldnt really want to kill a mouse, would you? 🙂
ok, the link didnt work, so here it is typed out… sorry
http://www.abundantearth.com/store/mousetrap1.html?AID=1156456&PID=242971
I don’t care how non-celeb you consider yourself Wil, giving pest control advice to tv’s Wil Wheaton it still bizarre in my book.
But hey, that’s cool.
Yeah, celebrities get infested with vermin, too. Usually, though, they give them some fixed percentage of their gross income, rather than letting them move into the ceiling and walls, but to each his own.
Traps.
Traps that goes snaps.
Snaps from the traps,
snaps on the rats.
Rats in the traps,
that go snaps on their taps.
One ring to rule them all …
Sorry. Got carried away there.
Hey Wil,
Two other possible methods:
Flute. Hey, it worked great for the Pied Piper. Plus, after your done coaxing all the rats out of your house, you could just pipe yourself all the way to the Paramount lot. Build an Army! Forget Monkeys with typewriters, a horde of slavering red-eyed rabies-carrying rodents might make those execs at the studio think twice about turning you down again…. Or they might thank you for rounding out their vagrant relatives….
Alternatively…
You might try a Nutcracker. Hey, he whooped the Rat King and his entire army, and they were probably far more organized than the hoods you likely have in your attic. Afterwards you might ask him to confirm for you that the word “Rad” has been added to the list of English words that have fallen into disuse, along with “thither” and “‘rents,” the oft-forgotten teen magazine slang for parents.
Charles,
Sick, dude, sick.
I like it.
I’m just curious if the head rat’s name is Jenner?
Funny, I was just telling my husband how my last rat (dead two years now) totally ruined me for ALL other rats… she was the best. Poor dead rats.
Kelly, brilliant idea. Y’know Wil, I bet this is karmic retribution for you voicing that mouse in that cartoon version of the Secret of NIMH (one of the best kids books ever!!) Your character might have escaped them in the movie, but… muahaha.
Ha! The funny thing is after I posted I got a funny feeling and went and looked up the secret of NIMH and had to laugh at the irony.
Bet I’m the only one who read Racso and the rats of NIMH.
And Mike… I have to assume the “Rats! Rats!” thing is in reference to a “Little Johnny” joke (which can be found on http://www.jokecompany.com/cgi-scripts/joke/joke.htm?3633).
So… this sonic repeller thing.. is it like disney toons?
Or just a continous loop of the talk track to the movie Glitter?
Or the worst.. just the guitar rift on the song, “Beautiful” by Flickerstick over and over again.
Don’t be that cruel.. really.
We use those things at our cabin, and they work pretty well, but you nearly need one in every room, and it did take a few weeks for it to work. But we dont live there, its just a vacation house we use on the weekends, so you might want to consult the “professionals”…as unsavory as that might be. Sorry…:(
My FIL was a bugman (exteminator) for many many years… he says call a pro, the sonic things are crap. You can use poison (CA law forbids the use of poisons that have secondary kill, so any pets are safe **UNLESS** they get into the poison themselves) but all in all, if you have rats, best bet to getting rid of them is to shell out the bucks and pay someone who knows what they’re doing.
You got to love those Dirty Johnny Jokes, hahaha.
As far as rats go, I don’t know crap about them. I killed one once with a broom does that help. I detest rodents in the highest fashion. For those that want them as pets more power to you, just don’t ask me to ratsit, haha.
Wil, hope you solve your rat problem, I know that would keep me awake at night, wondering if they would get out into the living area. YUCKY!
Your local chapter of the NRA should be getting together on Sunday. Give ’em something to do.
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(No, don’t fool around; hire a professional. Exterminator, not Terminator, that is.)