Chicken farm rat control

I go to all the glamorous places; last night I found myself creeping around the farm yard trying to pick off a few rats. With all the wet weather we’ve had recently, they’ve been more of a problem than in recent years, seeking the shelter of barns and outhouses.

I went down to my egg farm permission about 6.00pm. Kev and Neil joined me soon after. It’s got more than six thousand hens which wander about huge enclosures during the day, scratching about and generally doing what chickens do. As soon as the sun goes down they put themselves to bed in one of several large hen houses where they sit on nesting boxes a metre off the ground. Unfortunately, the space below the nesting boxes is full of what comes out the other end, and I’m not talking about eggs.

The combination of shelter, chicken muck and plenty of food makes the place an all-inclusive, five-star ratty resort. Shooting the rats involves little in the way of stealth or bush craft and our sessions at the egg farm have turned into something of a social event for us.

We break up endless tea and fag breaks with a bit of shooting here and there. The farmer is pleased enough – he always has a cake, tea bags and plenty of fresh milk to keep us going and most nights sends us home with a tray of eggs each.

Our tactics haven’t changed much in the years we’ve been coming. We station ourselves at different points in the yard where we know the rats are likely to show themselves and then pick them off. We even take comfy camping chairs to sit in; mine has a side table for my tea and fags.

If the sport is a little slow we venture out in the scratching fields. Often the rats will scurry around the edges of the hen houses. Thanks to the constant attention of thousands of chickens, the fields are a mass of muddy, poopy craters and with the recent rain, they are also slippery. No matter how much we encourage each other to ‘go and have a look’ all we really want is to see one of us face-plant into the chicken muck.

Air rifles are ideal for rat shooting. My favourite rifle for ratting is my .22 calibre 12 ft. lbs. Brocock Bantam Sniper HR on which I’ve mounted an MTC Viper Pro 3-18×50. The rifle has a reliable 10-shot magazine-fed regulated action which gives plenty of shots, and the scope has a tremendous magnification range – the wide field of view from the 3x magnification is great for spotting targets.

A Nite Site infrared system is another vital piece of kit and is perfect for scanning large areas comfortably, especially when used in conjunction with a set of trigger sticks. The whole set up is zeroed at 20 yards which results in a flat trajectory between 10 and 20 yards and covers most shots.

Thankfully it was a rare and relatively warm, dry and wind-free night.. As a result, the rats were more eager to venture out of their poop palaces and in between our cups of tea and fags we managed to pick off another 20.