You might have noticed small piles of chewed up paper, string, or other material and recognized it as a sign of a rodent infestation. Perhaps, instead, it was the droppings that tipped you off, or maybe you just saw a scampering little fur ball moving past you at lightening speed. Whatever the reason was, leaning that your home has a rodent control problem can be very upsetting. Determining what exactly the rodent is can be challenging.
Though most pest control companies will assist with either problem, if you intend to try it on your own, you’ll want to know what you are up against. There are a few different ways that you can determine whether it is a mouse or a rat that made the mess in the corner of your cupboard under the stairs in your basement.
Though they may appear similar at a glance, mice and rats are quite different. In fact, they are two entirely different species. Rats, though they tend to grown larger, actually mature more slowly. They can take up to fifteen days to develop the fur commonly associated with the animal. Before that, they are naked. Similarly, mice will make the same transformation, but will do so in just ten days. Once grown, however, the rat will dwarf the average mouse. The latter will grow to a maximum of eight inches including the length of the tail, whereas a rat can reach a full twenty inches.
On a mouse, the tail is often shorter than the length of the body, but rats can have a tail that exceeds the nine inch length of their bodies. Mice tend to have a shorter, rounder face, but rats’ will grow in more of a triangular shape, where the tip is a small nose. Rats also tend to have ears that look large compared to the overall size and shape of the head. The opposite is true of mice.
You haven’t seen the rodent? Don’t worry. Very often you can tell what you are up against simply by looking at the feces. Mouse excrement is very tiny, smaller than a grain of rice, but rat feces, due to their larger size, can be an inch in length or more.
There are many available ways to get mice or rats out of your home from a convention snap trap, to live traps, and even different forms of poison. If the problem does get too far out of hand, expert pest control specialists with a rodent elimination program can be hired to handle the issue for you.
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