House cats kill more critters than thought - researchers use cameras to track the slaughter

[1monster]

124. Our whole neighborhood was overrun with marsh rats. My husband put up a bird feeder

haning from the trellis over our deck. One evening, we heard a lot of noise coming from the deck area and turned on the outside lights. There were literally hundreds of rats crawling up the trellis and fighting over the birdseed falling from the feeder that they had chewed through.

On the deck below, there were mince and other critters eating up what the rats dropped.

Neighbors complained that rats were climbing in through their dryer vents and nesting there, thus ruining their dryers, clothing, and wiring.

In a period of a month, rats got into the walls of our enclosed deck and chewed through the four by four roof supports.

Many of us got cats and the serious rat problem became an annoyance and faded to a very occasional happening.

Marsh rats, by the way, are huge and it is next to impossible to keep up with the damage they do.