Anecdotally I hear that rats won’t enter a trap that has killed a stoat. Is this your experience? We have started to add an ear tag on the lid of stoat kill boxes to see if this is true. It would save bait and time if that is the case by not needing rat baits in those boxes. Thanks for any help on this topic.
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I checked our project data for stoat kills, and don’t see an obvious pattern of no rats - I found one trap that was recorded as having killed a stoat and a weasel and then a rat over about a fortnight. Maybe it depends how fresh the scent is and whether the trap smells of dead stoat (potential food) more than live stoat?
I’ll be interested to hear how your experiment goes!
I had a quick check of 12 traps that had caught a stoat in the first 6 months of the year. Of those 6 had caught a subsequent rat. So I dont see any correlation.
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Thanks for the info, good to know it isn’t an obvious factor. The belief might have come from the knowledge that rats have a very sensitive sense of smell.
Agree, no correlaton.