LogFAQs > #922085021

Professional pest control technician here.

There are other ways of dealing with rats besides glueboards, but there's no one "best way".

Rodenticides work fantastic, kill the animals without too much gruesome suffering (most modern rodenticides are bloodthinners which tends to result in fatal doses after about 4 days of eating it), however it also comes with the added risk of secondary poisoning to birds of prey if they eat multiple rodents with the active ingredient in their system.

Catch and re-release is incredibly pointless for the most part since rats and mice have large territories that can encompass miles, so you'd need to drive them somewhere like 20 minutes away to be effective, and at that point you're taking a communal animal that depends on nest mates/family to thrive and dropping it off in an unknown environment with no companions where it'll most likely be killed by competition, so is that really humane?

Snap/insta-kill traps are ineffective for large populations because the smartest/most cautious rodents will avoid them, however they are definitely the most humane.

So yeah, it's tricky. TBQH glueboards aren't even that effective for rodents because rats and mice are too wily for them to work all the time. We use glueboards for crickets most of the time. The few times we catch mice in glueboards, I do euthanize them since it is a pretty gruesome way to die. (One time I found a dead baby snake caught inside of a customer's house :( I felt really awful when I saw that.)
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