Rat-O-Matic does it again

L

LOL!

Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
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Jun 25, 2005
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Anybody else have a rat diced and chopped up by their outdoor AC fan?

Last night was the second time this has happened to us in the past 2 years. At first it makes a pretty loud racket as the bones are still stuck to metal by the juicy fleshy hairy bits.

I always go out and look to see if a stick or something has fallen in there and discover the demised Disney hopeful.

I don't bother to clean anything out as the blades do a great job and the flies get whatever's left.
 
I don't think I've ever seen a rat (the four-leg variety) anywhere near our hacienda in the 20 years we've lived here. Mice, yes, they are abundant. But they are so small we would never know when the AC fan did a whack job on one of them.
 
Use to have mice crawl into the electrical compartment of the AC condenser and chew through the wires and zap themselves.

They seemed to have a preference for the black wire and this usually happened over the winter.

I decided to leave the electrical panel off and haven't had a problem since.

-gauss
 
REWahoo said:
I don't think I've ever seen a rat (the four-leg variety) anywhere near our hacienda in the 20 years we've lived here. Mice, yes, they are abundant. But they are so small we would never know when the AC fan did a whack job on one of them.
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Snakes keep the rat population down?
 
I've used AC two days in two years. No rats to whopper chopper.
 
When we lived in Lake Jackson, TX we had a resident snake under our pool heater. Never saw a single mouse or rat in 4 years!
 
We had a cat once who diced a canal rat into 3 pieces. The nose was bitten off separately, and the whole mess left at the door as an Owner Appreciation Gift.
 
We've got chipmunks living under the AC pad, and some sort of critter set up housekeeping inside the unit during the winter. No casualties so far. They are welcome to stay if they don't try to re-wire the thing.
 
A rat got into and was killed by my furnace when I lived in upstate NY back in 1988 or so.
 
Never had it happen, but I'd be interested in how you lure them into the fan. Bait?
 
LOL! said:
I don't bother to clean anything out as the blades do a great job and the flies get whatever's left.
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With all the noise it shouldn't be hard to get there before the flies. You can have some stir-fry for dinner. It's already diced - what more do you need. Just add some veggies and a little bit of oil and you're good to go. LBYM ...
 
It's not hard to get there before the flies, but I am not getting out a nutdriver to open up the safety covering. The afternoon sun does a pretty good job of sautéing things inside the cover.

I'm not sure how they get lured in. I assume they are up high inside the cover for a moment when the fan is not on, but then it comes on and they drop into it. I have 2 outdoor AC units of slightly different design. This has only happened to the 2005 model and not the 1993 model.
 
Here ya go, just the book needed - The Original Road Kill Cookbook.

Family lore has it that my father once cooked a chicken by wrapping it in foil and cooking it on the exhaust manifold of the car during the four hour drive to his parent's house, stopping halfway to turn the chicken over. This was, of course, back in the day when you could actually see and have access to the exhaust manifold.
 
MichaelB said:
With all the noise it shouldn't be hard to get there before the flies. You can have some stir-fry for dinner. It's already diced - what more do you need. Just add some veggies and a little bit of oil and you're good to go. LBYM ...
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From squirrels to rats. What's next? :cool:
 
Dtail said:
From squirrels to rats. What's next? :cool:
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An adaptor to change the trap to work on squirrels. Not sure if you can tell the difference, dunno, never had rat(that I knew about).
 
I have eaten plenty of squirrel gumbo.
 
Speaking of snakes, I had one get cough up in the fan a few years. Stunk for a few weeks.
 
Back at the coal mine, we often had "events" where critters touched two legs on 12470V transformers. No chopping involved, but vaporization with fur and scale remnants.
 
The rats around here are way too big to get into an AC condenser unit. There is a Hoarder too close by. Cats won't get near them. The nowadays old-fashioned belt-driven engine cooling fan seems to be their only grim reaper. But they usually eat/gnaw through something important while under there, before they get smacked or sliced on startup.
 
Dtail said:
From squirrels to rats. What's next? :cool:
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MRG said:
An adaptor to change the trap to work on squirrels. Not sure if you can tell the difference, dunno, never had rat(that I knew about).
Click to expand...

Have had neither, but would imagine squirrel meat may be nutty, or pecany.

Rat meat may be like dog or cat food (which they steal to eat), or smells like sewer.
 
LOL
It's not hard to get there before the flies, but I am not getting out a nutdriver to open up the safety covering. The afternoon sun does a pretty good job of sautéing things inside the cover.

Rat jerky? Awesome. :dance:
 
Here's my favorite video of a man showing how to cook and eat a rat after catching one in a Paiute Deadfall Trap. It's good survival skill, for the Doomsday scenario discussed in a recent thread.

In the video, he picked out the rat testes, roasted and ate them too. A viewer commented "Yum, ratnuts roasting over an open fire" (sounds like a familiar Christmas song?).

PS. Link to video deleted. Interested viewers can find it themselves easily enough on youtube. :)

The video title is "Cooking and Eating Rats. Paiute Deadfall Trap in Action Part 3. Bushcraft Survival Skills".
 
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