The mouse problem in the house is annoying, year after year, but you can handle it before they eat all the rice or whatever in the cupboard and mess up another drawer with the nest made out of shredded paper or cardboard. Melted chocolate on the traps which they can't nibble off in safety as they may with cheese as bait. Rats are another matter. Not that they get into the house, out they are outside picking up dropped grain from the bird-feeders and sometimes getting into the utility or store rooms. How? Someone left the door open? Or is there an entry along the pipes?
When it comes to putting down rat poison under a stone or into their holes, you hesitate. Suppose the dog dug up the stone in following a rat? And if you live from the water of your own well, you might wonder, after reading Michael Viney on ground water and the permeability or not of the rocks beneath, if in poisoning rats you might get essence of rat in the water you drink.
There is a better way. Get Burmese cats, a pair. In a house that keeps horses and a few dogs which are not slow to chase a rat or rabbit, they come far behind the Burmese in rodent extermination. (The chickens were slaughtered by the furry brigade long ago.) But the chocolate-brown killers daily show their paces by laying at the bedside of their owners, or at the head of the stairs, a mouse, a shrew, a rat or a rabbit. How these slender creatures manage to climb up the trellis and through the rambler roses to reach the second-floor catflap, carrying a rabbit or a rat, almost beats belief. But they do. And they have the advantage in showing their paces over the poor dogs, in that their cat-world extends into the night, when the gundogs are asleep in their baskets or in front of the fire.
Plop goes the cat-flap and thump onto the carpet goes the rabbit or rat. You'd say, on such evidence, that every house in the country should have a pair of these elegant killers. And they are good with children, never putting out a claw. Dainty, discriminating killers. Not wanting to knock the manufacturers of rodenticides, but the cat system seems to have few disadvantages. And there are no deadly traces around to get into your water system or anyone else's.
One drawback: they do go after birds and sometimes bring home the corpses. But not often.