A Tallow Alternative

[willowflat_warrior]

If anybody read my post months ago describing how effective tallow has been for me as an edible lure, but couldn’t find any at the store, your problem may have been solved. On my last trip the store, I saw that Pans is selling pots of dripping, which is another term for tallow. A 454g pot was only $6.49 at Pak 'N Save, so it’s a very cheap lure to try. A pot that size will lure a lot of traps for a long time.

Spring and summer are excellent times to try dripping, because it has a stronger smell when it’s warm, having the scent of roast beef or lamb. The reason why peanut butter and walnuts are some of the best rat lures, is because they’re foods with a high fat content. It should come as no surprise, then, that a 100% fat lure has been so effective.

Mustelids
Given their inability to store fat, dripping should be the most attractive edible lure that trappers can use. Fresh and salted rabbit are the go-to mustelid lures, but rabbit flesh is lean. What mustelids hunting rabbits are mainly after is their fat-rich brains. Stoats and weasels are known to kill rabbits and only eat the brains.
A small piece of dripping inside a tunnel or inside the bait cup of a snap trap, are as close as the vast majority of trappers can get to using the real thing.

Coating
Dripping can be melted, which allows trappers to coat lures with fat. For example, pieces of Erayz can be dipped into a glass or pot containing warm dripping or it could be put on with a spoon on a flat surface. As it cools, dripping hardens and becomes brittle, unfortunately, so you won’t be able to completely coat a piece of Erayz with it. To those of you using it as a lure, I’d be astonished if dripping-coated Erayz didn’t increase your kill rates.

Rabbit Flesh
It stands to reason that fresh or salted rabbit would appeal even more to mustelids if dripping was used in conjunction with them. When a piece of fresh rabbit is on the verge of becoming too rotten to attract mustelids, the scent of fat might be enough to lure them inside a tunnel.

To trap shy individuals, the combination of rabbit flesh and fat may increase the odds of them interacting with a trap. A pre-feed of dripping would be very wise, as it might get them hooked on it.

Please feel free to ask questions and place feedback.

Good trapping!

[gregvp]

I have been using Goodnature “Meat Lovers” lure when I run out of rabbit out on the lines, but this makes a lot of sense. The “Meat Lovers” hasn’t been effective so far.

Thank you, @willowflat_warrior.

Right ! Off to Pak’N’Save!

[willowflat_warrior]

I’ve had heaps of success with Meat Lovers’, using it in my snap traps, DOC tunnels, and as a coating on flesh lures in my Timms. I’d stick with it for a while.

When/if you use rabbit again, try giving part of the flesh a smear of Meat Lovers’. It will make the rabbit look and smell like a fresh, bloody kill, and I doubt that mustelids would have trouble smelling the rabbit underneath it. The same thing applies to Erayz.

If blowflies are a problem, like they are here, coating an entire piece of rabbit in Meat Lovers’ could extend its field-life considerably. Without maggots to worry about, my flesh lures last way, way longer than exposed ones used to.

Cheers.

[gregvp]

I’ve just dipped a bunch of frozen rabbit chunks and some erayz pieces in Pam’s dripping. I’ll give that a go. If I were craving fat, I’d be following that scent. But I don’t know how stoats’ minds work yet.

And I’ll get some more Meat Lovers’ too perhaps. I’ve been using it as my back-up lure for when I run out of baits near the end of a line.

Edit: yes, flies are a problem, starting about now. Up till now it’s mostly been mould. Salted rabbit seems like a good idea but having to pack old, possibly mouldy bits back out of the forest isn’t a fun prospect.

I’ve seen your posts about vinegar spray for mould. What dilution of the supermarket white vinegar do you use?

[willowflat_warrior]

To carnivore species that can’t store body fat, I can’t imagine that many mustelids would pass up the opportunity to eat pure fat, especially hungry/starving juveniles. Female mustelids nursing their kits are known to hunt as many as 40 mice per day, so the opportunity to eat a nice helping of fat may be too good to pass up. A piece of fat the size of a marble is the equivalent of how many mouse brains? 10? 20?

Meat Lovers’ is definitely a good lure of last resort, but I use it year-round. Every predator here loves the stuff and it’s a really economical lure.

While it’s true that rats dislike moldy foods, chunks of fat appear to be the exception to the rule. Rats can smell the good fat underneath the layer of mold and they will chew through the mold to reach it. If you designated 1 tunnel for lures past their prime, you might trap more predators than you think. An annual tidy up is a good idea, though!

The vinegar is normal, store-bought stuff. In the past, I’d been mainly spraying my lures with vinegar when mold was a problem, but pickling meat/fat with vinegar for a few days in an old tin gives flesh lures better and longer mold-resistance, and the predators here love it.

I’ve had much better success using cooked flesh lures than raw ones. The next time you have some cooked meat scraps, like gristle from a chop, or the white fat bordering cheap cuts of meat, soak them for 2 days and find out what the local predators think with a pre-feed. An alternative would be to fry up a few cheap sausages and soak slices of them.

Good trapping!

[gregvp]

Thanks, @willowflat_warrior! You make good points about the desirability of fat.

I’ll take the leftover dripping to smear a bit on the box ends - a simplified pre-feed. (It’s all wooden boxes with DOC200s and 250s in the project I’m helping on. Some doubles, mostly singles.) Hopefully it doesn’t attract birds - that would be counterproductive.

[willowflat_warrior]

Tallow is a potential risk to some bird exotic bird species, like sparrows, waxeyes, and chaffinches, but I have yet to trap a bird using tallow after using it extensively for 2 years. The base of the bird feeders that have seeds attached to them, is tallow, which they eat. The odds are high that a predator will eat the tallow at the entrance(s) to your tunnels before a bird would discover it, so I wouldn’t worry about the pre-feed that you’ve done.

In the bush, the only native bird that’s at risk of being trapped with tallow is the robin. Apparently, white items on the forest floor can pique their interest, and tallow would be appealing to them, because they eat fatty insects and grubs. I use a smear of Meat Lovers’ on the entrance(s) of my tunnels, followed by a smear of tallow on the inside wall a short distance away from the second baffle, to play it safe. If your DOC tunnels have ramps, a smear on top of them is another good spot.

Cheers.

[mindie]

Great information WFW – it got me thinking about easy access to animal fats – the local butcher that breaks down animals for the shop – so I dropped in and asked if they had anything I could use in our pest traps – he took me out the back and pulled out a chunk of fat off a beef animal – 10kg – all chunked up into useable blocks and in the freezer for next week – also bought a tray of chicken wings from PAK’nSAVE – they will be living off the fat of the land!

[gregvp]

Thanks for the info @willowflat_warrior. Good to know about the birds.

22 traps baited today with the rabbit and tallow. We’ll see how they go. (As usual I spent more time clearing fallen trees than walking the line. That’s how it goes. At least it’ll be quicker next time.)

[willowflat_warrior]

During spring and summer, I have to bring my secateurs with me, because blackberries attack my tracks from both sides, and there are Cotoneasters shrubs all over the place, which I’m slowly clearing. I’d love to spray these weeds, but there are too many regenerating natives growing at the same sites, so I have to careful how I control them. While I am not a fan of the feral goats in the area, they do some occasional weed clearance for me.

[willowflat_warrior]

It’d be a slow job with such a huge amount of fat to store, but I recommend cutting a lot of it up into pieces before you freeze them in plastic bags or containers. For my Timms and DOC tunnels, I make them about 1" cubed. If you only need a few pieces, you can pry a few of them off of each other when they’ve thawed for a few minutes, but a medium or large block can take a lot longer to thaw, and cutting frozen fat can be tricky.

You’d need a lot of small bags, but you could put 10 pieces, for example, in a bag and put it in with your other gear. By the time you reach your first trap, the fat may have thawed enough to use it. If you plan to skewer any of the pieces, be sure to make a hole through them with your knife. Unless the skewers are narrow and sharp, pushing thick pieces of fat can be frustrating and dangerous (I’ve had a few close calls with nail skewers!).

Once you’ve thawed pieces of fat, I recommend frying them up to the point that they get a brown outer layer. This has been way more very effective for me, compared to using raw fat, for the following reasons:

The pieces of fat get a nice, firm outer layer that’s more difficult for predators to eat than soft fat. It takes mice way longer to eat than raw fat, if they’re a problem. When predators have to sink their teeth into the fat, instead of giving it a gentle nibble, they’re more likely to spring a trap. Pieces of raw fat would get nibbled off of the skewer in my Timms before I started to cook the fat. them. After that, I started trapping large rats and more cats.

Blowflies can’t puncture the cooked fat to lay eggs, and ants and/or cockroaches have a hell of a time eating it.

The layer of grease that the pieces get on them when they’ve been fried, makes the fat smell really nice and the smell travels better than the mild smell of raw fat. At close range, predators have no problem detecting the raw fat underneath the shell. The greasy coating gives the fat some waterproofing and mold-resistance.

Collect the grease in the pan to put drops nearby as pre-feeds or to give pieces a nice coating of it. With snap trap bait cups, fill them up with some.

The shell protects the inner fat from the elements. The outer layer becomes like jerky as it dries out in the heat, which keeps the inner fat relatively cool and moist.

Cheers.

[christina.g]

When I can, I also like to take a herbicide gel like Cut’n’Paste with me on bush trips. Folding saw, secateurs and gel will control many species of pest plants and can easily be popped into cargo pants pockets or toolbelt pouches. Really extensive pest plant infestations may still need spraying, of course, but gel is very handy for those pesky bird-dispersed species that pop up unexpectedly and are hard to find when you come back looking for them (even when you’ve thought to tie flagging tape to the unwanted plant).

[ctm]

That is a coincidence I also found the Pam’s drippings in the shop. Tallow is hard to come by. However, no pests want to touch it. I assume it is so refined they removed all the flavor-scent. So I stopped using it. I might give at another go in summer. I combined it with blue paste on top but they leave the tallow on the trigger plate.

[willowflat_warrior]

Tallow has a stronger smell as it warms up, like all fats do. Right out of the fridge, it is tough to smell. Predators are so attuned to the scent of fat, that they zero in on it here in the depths of winter.

I’m surprised that nothing ate it. If the predators here don’t gobble it up, the insects go for it.

One thing that you can do to intensify the smell of tallow/drippings, is to melt some in the microwave in a glass container with a lid on top of it, because it can spit. Get it half melted, give it a stir, and finish it off. Once it’s cooled down, you can put it inside a plastic container.

I highly recommend giving it another go.

[tckccoord]

Hey there our group baits our traps with Beef fat that we get from the butchery dept at pack n save. We chop into pieces and free flow freeze it (so its easy for trappers to take what they need) for our 900 mustelid traps.
I’m not 100% sure about the data on increase of stoat catches since we’ve done this because we’ve also increased our schedule to fortnightly trap rounds in that time, so the data is hard to quantify. But I do know is that the number of feral cats we catch in DOC 200’s has increased significantly since adding beef fat.
I think it makes sense that stoats would be attracted to fat too.

[ctm]

Okay, I will give it another go. See how it goes. Thanks.
A good thing is the ants didn’t take it either. So it will go for longer.

[willowflat_warrior]

Where I am, some ant species love tallow, and some ignore it completely. The good thing is, the ants that like it are only a problem in warm/hot weather, which suggests that they find it easier to smell than when it’s cold. They’re active all year, so it’s the only explanation that makes sense to me.

I figure that a trail of ants carrying small pieces of fat out of a tunnel is a good way to get the attention of predators.

[willowflat_warrior]

I tried Pams Drippings for the first time yesterday. It isn’t exactly the same as tallow. Tallow looks like white candle wax and has a firm texture that’s similar to wax, so you have to break it into bits with a knife. The drippings are a light yellow and softer, making it easier to use, especially in/on snap-traps. The drippings are easier to smell, too.

Cheers.

[willowflat_warrior]

In theory, fatty lures should be the best lures for carnivores, like mustelids and cats, and it’s highly sought after by omnivores, too. You can use practically anything to lure rats, but I’ve had way more success with fatty lures than anything else. The fact that fat can be a long-lasting lure enhances its value significantly. I’ve never had tallow go moldy, but pieces of fat do. The reason for this is the big difference in water content between processed and unprocessed fat. The more moisture a lure contains, the easier it is for mold to colonize it.

In humid and wet weather, I’ve had a lot of success either salting fat or soaking it for a few days in white vinegar (just the supermarket kind). It takes way, way longer to go moldy than untreated fat, if that’s been a problem for you. If you have traps near bodies of water, it would be well worth your while to use vinegar (and it’s cheap). The predators here love vinegar and salt is something that a lot of animals are attracted to.

This wouldn’t be a realistic large-scale option for you, because you run so many traps, but I often cook pieces of fat. Cooked fat smells stronger, so it travels farther; it smells nicer and is something that will make some individuals curious; it gets a nice coat of grease that gives it some protection from the elements; its firmer texture makes it harder for mice and insects to eat; and flies have a much harder time laying maggots in it. If you skewer pieces of fat in traps in summer, cooked fat is something that you should definitely try. Raw fat in my Timms traps would be full of maggots in no time and start to smell awful quickly, so trapping cats was damn near impossible. With cooked fat, it stays good for weeks and cooked fat is easier to skewer and stays in place, whereas raw fat can slide down.

You also get a good amount of grease when you cook the fat, which is an excellent lure to drip into tunnels. I put some drops of grease onto the far end of a set DOC trap, which has led to a big increase in female weasel kills, because they stop on the treadle to eat the grease, instead of running or jumping across it to eat the lure at the back or middle of a tunnel. This is the time of year to kill as many female mustelids and small juveniles as possible, so frying up enough fat to lure even 5% of your tunnels might pay off. Use pieces of fat twice the size as you normally do, to account for the pieces shrinking. Pan-frying fat would be an inefficient way to cook a decent amount of fat for your traps, so cooking it in an oven on a metal tray would be the way to go.

Cheers.

[tckccoord]

Thanks for your thoughts, cooking is not an option for us, free-flow freezing is time consuming enough! But we refresh the fat every 2 weeks so that works for us.
Keep up the great work Willow Flat Warrior!