How to Get Rid of a Pack Rat

Pack rat nests, or “middens,” are another indicator of a critter problem. I say “indicator” because they aren’t always occupied; some middens are old enough that science nerds use the generations of petrified pee inside to see what pollen was around when Neanderthals were alive. Middens will have piles of sticks and sometimes small bones or coyote poop, and they’re often in a rock pile or in the hollow of a rotten tree. If you’re on the fence about whether something is an active midden, the color, smell, and consistency of stools and urine will let you know if there’s been recent activity – dark-brown, hard spoor and a distinct smell means it’s newer, whereas something that has the color and texture of cardboard has been around awhile.

While revenge might tempt you to light their fuel-rich shelter on fire, remember middens can often be on top of tree roots that can smolder for weeks underground and can even reignite when their slow-burning subterranean fuses reach topside again. Karma, indeed.

If you’ve got common pack rat visitors, you can locate their usual haunts by the piles and stains they leave. From these, at least in an indoor space, it isn’t hard to trace a likely path to where they might be nesting.

Hunting

While pack rats are typically most active at night, they don’t seem to mind being active in dark spaces during the daytime. Bushy-tailed woodrats are the most problematic because they’re the most “aggressive.” By that, I mean that they don’t mind human cohabitation, but also their twinkly-eyed stare is actually a stare-down as they assert their dominance over your intrusion. To add onto this already ridiculous suicide pact with themselves, they also assert their aggression by “thumping,” which is to say, when you’re chasing one down and have lost it, it’ll make a tapping noise to show you who’s boss in a horribly written Darwinian joke. Not all woodrats (North American native rats) or even all pack rats (western woodrats) exhibit this behavior, but the most problematic ones (bushy-tailed woodrats) do.

In storage areas, .22-caliber shotshell loads are strong enough to be effective through cardboard boxes but not pass through a plywood wall, and there’s enough tiny shot to bring a mercifully quick death in a situation where you don’t have time for precise shot placement. Eye protection is critical with these loads to keep ricochets from making you the victim.

When the car’s AC fan spits grass clippings onto your lap, you’ll need to act fast. A helper typically manages the flashlight and lifts the hood while I manage the trigger, hoping to both spot the critter and make a well-placed shot before it dives for cover in the quarter panel. Because of the sensitive nature of the backdrop, I tend to do this work with my son’s now-too-small Red Ryder BB gun, which cocks quickly and is just powerful enough to do the job, but weak enough that a miss is less consequential. On the rare occasion when I spot a pack rat more than a few feet away, I’ll use a pellet gun. With lead pellets, and much more so with the zillions of teensy #12 lead shot balls in .22 shotshells, remember that if you leave a lead-contaminated carcass out for the owls that take care of your vole problem, they’ll eventually stop helping you with the voles.

Predation

If you don’t mind doing a fair bit of work, a schnauzer or a rat terrier that’s had its shots can really lay waste to a pack rat population. Barn cats can also cut down a pack rat population to nothing, but they’ll need to be pretty stout, and in places where rats like to live, there’s also usually a healthy coyote population that’s constantly trying to do to cats what the cats are doing to the rats. Fortunately, coyotes also like to eat woodrats, as do raptors and snakes. One Grit editor even loosed a guinea fowl in her crawl space and never heard from her pack rat visitors again.

Trapping Pack Rats

Like those guinea fowl, traps just don’t discriminate. Even well-thought-out trapping plans often end sadly. Bycatch (catching something you don’t intend to) is a real thing. A friend of mine is haunted by guilt after putting a Conibear-style rat trap in the rafters of his shed, only to find that his neighbor’s cat had gained entry to the shed. Often (but not always), placement can help with this – a rabbit can’t climb straight up a wooden wall like a pack rat can. Placing a trap in the middle of a long PVC tube will make it attractive to rats but will also keep a nosey dog or a curious chicken from getting caught in it.

Trap choice also helps with bycatch. Glue traps are ridiculously bad bycatch traps. They’re absolutely indiscriminate in their victims and torturous in their methods. I hate a pack rat as much as the next guy, but I won’t use a glue trap to kill it and every other little critter that happens to wander by.

Check any humane live-catch traps often. A pack rat caught in one of these traps will exhaust itself from exposure, escape attempts, and stress after a few hours, and it may not live overnight.

I’ve had almost no luck with traditional rat traps, which seem to either launch the pack rat out of the way or jump out of the way themselves with their ultralight wooden bodies and heavy wire hoops. In experiments where they’re screwed down to some ballast, I still almost always come up empty-handed, perhaps because the long dog (the metal bar that holds the wire killing loop back) can clear the pack rat out of danger if the pack rat is on top of it.

Likewise, I’ve never once caught a pack rat in the plastic jaw-style traps that reset themselves automatically when you squeeze the spring. I think much of this has to do with the pack rat’s diet and the way these traps trigger. Traditional wooden traps with wire hoops have small, baited triggers, while plastic-jaw traps have large triggers but relatively little open-air real estate above them on which to perch.

Pack rats love their vantage points. You can tell how much they like a particular perch because they vote with their poop. They also love to travel the edges of walls. What they really can’t resist is a dark, protected space, such as a large PVC pipe or a deep, narrow cardboard box, especially if it’s closed-ended. If you can combine these two things, a shelter on a nice lookout spot or along a run, you’ll give them an irresistible exploring opportunity. Couple this with an effective trapping method, and you can start to reclaim your space.

My favorite trap is a 4-inch-jaw, long-spring foothold trap – the kind you’d imagine a mountain man carrying. The triggers on these traps are large, sensitive pads in the middle of the trap that lend themselves well to climbing on. These 4-inch traps are usually large enough to grab the animal by the middle for a quick expiration. Even slightly smaller traps with 3.5-inch jaws tend to catch rats by their extremities and make them suffer until you’re around to dispatch them. Larger traps will still sometimes catch a foot, so set them in a way that gives you convenient visibility. This will help you be more humane and detect dead critters before they start smelling dead.

Wire the traps to something big or heavy or both to keep them where you left them in case of a nonfatal hold, or if a predator decides a dead pack rat is a good snack but can’t free it from the trap. I almost never bait these traps because the bait tends to feed the mice that don’t get caught in them, and the catch rate seems the same.

Experts recommend peanut butter and oatmeal as bait, while others recommend anise or caraway oil as an attractant, presumably to excite the pack rat’s taste for things other critters can’t eat.

Poison

Poison combines all the downsides of hunting and trapping. Just like with bodies filled with those teeny lead pellets, you’ve got to be careful with carcasses when they’re expired from most poisons. Just to make it sporty, rodents also don’t tell you where they died or what they died from, so you’ll never really know if you got them or where all that poison went. Be careful that your favorite pet doesn’t eat the poison – it’s easy to run up a $1,000 vet bill if your friend’s curious dog finds and demolishes your store of it. What finally made me give up using those bright-yellow poison blocks was consistently finding more than enough bright-yellow rat droppings to convince me they weren’t working. Pack rats are, after all, specialists in eating toxic things.

Prevention

Let’s be honest, nobody who doesn’t already have a pack rat problem is going to invest time in preventing them. We’re reactionary critters, but we can always change our ways to keep from getting more of them. Unlike Norway rats, pack rats are often after your shelter more than your food, and they just like to have stuff to chew on. Make the space unattractive to them. Trade out cardboard boxes for lidded plastic totes. Clean up and declutter the area – get stuff into boxes and out of corners and seal up any animal feed. Press those boxes all the way up against the wall so there’s no gap between the box and the wall. Invest in some caulk or spray foam to plug up gaps (for big gaps, wad up some hardware cloth or chicken wire and spray the foam over that to keep it from getting chewed through). Even just painting wood bright and white makes a space less appealing to pack rats.

Pack rats can fit into anything they can get their head into. Because they have flexible jaws (like all rodents), that’s a small space. This is the worst in cars. They love to make nests in free areas under the hood. In areas where the safe operation of the vehicle can tolerate it, a friend of mine occupies any open areas in the engine compartment with empty plastic soda bottles (with a tiny bit of water in them for ballast).

Pack rats also love the privacy and coziness of an engine compartment, but only when it’s closed. When the hood is up, the space suddenly becomes much less attractive. Every now and then, you might hear a thunk in your engine compartment and see roadkill in your rearview mirror that didn’t come from the road. The fan belt is an effective killer, but I’d rather it just got used for that which it was intended.

Maintenance

Pack rat activity is seasonal, with the spring breeding and summer caching months seeing the most traffic. They don’t hibernate, but they do hunker down in the winter, so there may be a long period where you don’t see the fuzzy little tail and the black, black heart of these barn goblins – it’s easy to stop maintaining traps once you think you’ve solved the problem.

Special thanks to Weber State University professor of zoology Michele Skopec for volunteering her expertise on this topic.

Josh Lau is an engineer, inventor, scoutmaster, and centimarathoner. He raises steers, chickens, and fish in the middle of Oregon with his amazing family

Originally published in the May/June 2025 issue of Grit magazine and regularly vetted for accuracy.