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.