216 BOARD OF AGRICULTURE. [Pub. Doc. 



food, such as toasted cheese, bacon, sausage, fish or fish heads, 

 will attract them where grain will not. The bait commonly used 

 for the flat traps (Plate VI.) was a small bit of fried bacon. 

 When forty or fifty traps were to be baited quickly, a piece of 

 bacon was fried, cut into pieces w4th scissors, each piece pressed 

 into the hole in the tread of a trap, and the partly melted 

 grease poured in until the hole was filled. Also, strong smelling 

 cheese was used; it was toasted, and, while still hot, forced into 

 the hole in the tread with a knife blade. These traps require 

 very little bait. Other traps, where the bait must be tied on or 

 hooked on, may be baited with cheese, bacon, corn, or any 

 tenacious meat or vegetable bait. Some writers assert that a 

 rat has no choice of food, but I have known rats to pay no 

 attention to stale, dirty bait for weeks, and to be caught 

 immediately when the bait was changed for something more 

 enticing. It is a good plan to change the bait now and then, 

 using some tempting food other than the one commonly em- 

 ployed. Cakes, doughnuts, honey, syrup or molasses, chicken, 

 chickens' feet, scraps of raw or cooked beef or pork, prunes and 

 other fruits and fresh vegetables all may be useful. 



The Wire Cage Trap. — Where rats are numerous, particularly 

 about slaughterhouses or meat markets, the large nineteen or 

 twenty inch French wire cage traps may be useful. The 

 smaller cage traps, made of light wire, often will not hold 

 strong, full-grown rats, which will force the wires apart, but 

 the larger traps, if made of stiff, strong wire, well bound with 

 lighter wire, Vvill hold a rat of any size. More than 25 rats, 

 mostly young ones, have been taken in one of these large traps 

 in a single night, and 200 have been taken in a season, but 

 this is very unusual. Many of the smaller wire traps are in 

 use, and though ordinarily set without any precautions, some 

 success in their use has been reported by many Massachusetts 

 people, but wire traps are not commonly nearly as effective as 

 snap traps properly handled, and young rats are largely the 

 victims. In many cases, where wire traps are exposed openly 

 to view, rats cannot be enticed into them, and if once rats are 

 caught in one their fellows may avoid it afterward. In such a 

 case, where a trap had been set fruitlessly in a barn for weeks, 

 baited with grain, I pushed it aside against a horse stall, 



