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How Quickly Do Norway Rat infestations Get Out Of Control?

How Quickly Do Norway Rat infestations Get Out Of Control?

Most pest infestations start out slow and then get out of hand over time. Norway rats are a different breed. If a male and female Norway rat enter the home, it’s a race to the finish line, with the infestation growing exponentially as the weeks and months go by.

Two rats are enough to start a large infestation

Norway rats are impressive when it comes to their reproductive speed. A single female is able to produce up to five litters of pups a year, with each litter containing as many as 14 pups. From there, it only takes five weeks for these pups to reach maturity. When you add it all up, you can have as many as 15,000 rats being traced back to a single lineage in one year. In the home, it’s unlikely that the rat population will get up in the thousands, but you might have a dozen rats scurrying around in the walls within a few months.

Why rats are so dangerous

Rats are very dangerous pests for two main reasons – they chew on electrical wiring in the walls creating fire hazards, and they spread dozens of diseases by simply getting in contact with a surface that you use. And the longer a rat infestation goes on, the bigger it grows, and the higher the risks associated with a rat presence get.

Getting rid of an infestation

If you catch the infestation while it’s still small, you can have it removed using traps. Traps are great when you are dealing with a handful of rats, but as the infestation grows in number, the rats will figure out that the traps are being used to kill them, and they will start avoiding them. At this point, you will have to go with poisons.

Poisons can ravage large rat populations, but they come with the downside that you can’t really tell where a rat is going to die. It may die somewhere out in the open, behind the furniture, in the basement or attic, or it could die inside a wall void in its nest. So the clean up process becomes essential when using poisons against rats.

Contact us today if you would like to know more about the things you can do to stop a Norway rat infestation in its tracks or if you have a Norway rat infestation that needs to be removed.

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