1620: Rodent Control in Your Barn with Alayne Blickle

0:00Hello, everybody. I'm Justin Long, host of Straight from the Horse Doctors' mouth, and I want to talk to you about something every horse owner dreads, emergencies. In these moments, indecision makes it hard to know what to do, or if you should call your vet. That's why Dr. Latcher and I created the Equine Emergency Vet Care Guide. This is an app that walks you step-by-step through common equine emergencies, helps you decide when to call, and tells you exactly what information your veterinarian needs. It's not a replacement for your vet, and helps you work with them towards the best outcome for your horse. Search Equine Emergency App in the App Store or Google Play and be prepared before the emergency happens. You are listening to the Horse Radio Network, part of the Equine Network family. Greetings, everyone. Coach Jen here, and thanks for tuning in to Horse Tip Daily, episode 1620. Today, we are joined by Elaine Blickley, who shares some practical and environmentally

1:03sound advice for keeping rodents out of your barn, and what to do if they've already moved in. You can enjoy your favorite equine videos all in one place with Ride TV, the ultimate equine streaming platform. The newly relaunched Ride TV has all the series you love, like Rockstar Vets and Mini Horses, plus top-tier training videos and event footage from bellracing.com and horse and rider on demand. Whether you're ready to relax with your favorite series, binge watch competition footage, or train with a world champion, subscribe to Ride TV today for only $19.99 to see where your ride takes you. Visit rideTVgo.tv to subscribe. And I am so happy to invite Elaine Blickley, a lifelong equestrian and reigning competitor, and the director of Horses for Clean Water. You may have stopped by her website, and it's an internationally acclaimed education program for horse owners everywhere. And she's going to be here today to help us tackle rodent control for the barn, because

2:06as the colder temperatures come closer, it seems like every critter in town wants to move in, and we need to double down our critter control efforts. So welcome to the show, Elaine. Thank you. Thank you for having me. We're going to start out with defining what a rodent is, because one guy's past is another guy's helpful creature. So for the purposes of this conversation, what kind of critters are we talking about that need to be evicted, and why do we want to evict them? Well, generally speaking, for horse people, it's mice and rats that are the problem, and the problem is that they can damage quite a bit of property through gnawing and through creating holes or passageways into things and through eating feed and other products, and then also by creating a mess through their

3:12droppings, their fecal droppings, as well as through spreading diseases, different kinds of mice like deer mice carry diseases that can be a problem for humans. So it's just not a good idea to be living co-habitating with rodents. I like that co-habitating. So you're basic race and you're basic mice now. Yeah, and they're cuter than a bug's ear, as far as I'm concerned, they're just really cute. And I always feel bad about kicking them out, but there's good reason for it. So let's start out with the first problem, which is ideally we don't want them to move in to begin with. So how can we discourage them moving in at all? Yeah, that's a perfect place to start with. So any time you have an unwanted animal, either a wanted one or an unwanted one, the way that you control them is by controlling their habitat, so that food, water, and shelter.

4:22If you look at what they need for and what their sources are for food, for water, and for where they want to live and breed. So for with our rodents, what they're going to want is some kind of little hidey hole place that they can hide where they can nest. If you want a food source, which could be the cat food or dog food that is left out all night, or it could be spilled grain, or it could just be grain set out in a paper bag, or even in a plastic like rubber made kind of container. Those would be their food source, and then the water source would be leaking water faucet or water bowl for the cat or dog. The nesting would be like old feed bags or old towels or rags that you've got laying around, or your saddle blankets, blankets, the old ones that you've got piled up in the corner.

5:33Anything like that is going to create good habitat, good food, water, and breeding site or nesting site for rodents. So if we can get rid of those things and clean it up to begin with, it's going to make a big difference as far as them even coming in. The other thing you want to think about is closing up holes. So they say a mouse can get through a hole that's as small as a half an inch. So if you have holes into your tack room or a space underneath your tack door, like I was just noticing today in our tack room. Anything you can do to plug those up will help a limit passageway for them in the first place. And then if you can keep things cleaned up, picked up neat and tidy, not have trash around or towels or horse blankets laying in a pile, those are the kind of things that they really like.

6:38Does that make sense? That makes perfect sense. And this is a good time to, we used to call it GI the tack room in the feed room. Take it all out, pile it in the aisle way, have a pizza party. And if you have adults who prefer adult beverages, maybe some adult beverages with your pizza party. Right. All the nooks and crannies, and this is something I have to do frequently at horse radio network headquarters because our feed room and tack room are all the same room. This stall is not enclosed in any way, shape or form, except for a stall door. So creatures from around the universe have free access to it. So I have a constant battle of keeping nature from moving into my tack room. And I made the mistake of storing away some spare tack that I don't use anymore, some saddle pads and some old halters and a couple of muzzles. I put them in a big plastic tote, but I didn't put a lid on it. Right.

7:38Oh, yeah. Happy home for mice and rats. Yes, they moved in big time. And I just threw the whole thing away because they moved in and it was kind of yucky in there because they had a clean. Yeah, they don't, they don't keep their house real clean. So I just took the whole thing through the way. So if you're going to store away things, clean them first and put them in big plastic totes. It's one of the favorite things to do to keep things from getting too gnarly in there. Because you know how if it's not temperature controlled and it's inside of a plastic container, things can get a little gnarly. I have discovered the joy of cedar chips or cedar shading or cedar. It looks like sawdust, but it's cedar. And I throw a couple of handfuls of that in with it and it helps keep things from getting too awfully nasty. Or you can buy online, you can buy those little packets that help keep things dry and you can buy them in bulk handy way to do it too. So we're cleaning up now. Yeah, that's a good idea.

8:38Give me an idea. I have a feed room. I feel like I keep my feed room pretty clean. Will little tiny bits of feed like, you know, half a dozen kernels of feed spilt and piled up behind my shelf every day. Is that enough to attract a mouse? Yeah, totally. Don't have the statistics in farming, but it's crazy how little they need to survive. But yeah, just a little bit of spilt supplements when you're measuring out their vitamins and minerals and evening time enough to sustain a mouse. Yeah, and their reproduction rate is just crazy fast. And it's it, you know, you can have a pretty large colony of mice in no time with just starting with a couple. There you go. I laughed the first year we were here in Florida. I got some some mice move into my feed room in the fall when it started to get chillier and we laughed about it because they had broken into my

9:47flax seed container that I had the mice move. No, I mean softest coats anywhere in Florida. Yeah, totally that's that's funny. Yeah, so what you want to do is put everything in metal containers. So like we at our barn, we have garbage cans and all my borders. We have our food supplements for the horses all in garbage cans, labeled garbage cans. And then all of our borders have the same thing they have to bring their own garbage can for their supplements. Plastic, the mice and rats can still chew through plastic. So you want to try to avoid those or monitor them pretty carefully to make sure you're not getting anything chewing on it. And then when you do spill, clean it up, also pick up dog and cat food. Yeah, right away and pick up dog and cat food and as well as their water bowl, don't leave it out 24 seven.

10:47Otherwise, it's a smorgasbord for the mice and rats. We regularly here at horse radio network or headquarters, there, there's a water bowl at the end of the aisle way that is left there frequently. Sometimes for days at the time, it's just a little water bowl and it's for one of the local dogs that stops by and visits us. But I will often see a raccoon sipping from that away in the morning. So we're helping out the local roads. Now, let's say you, you, you fell off the bandwagon and you did not clean your tack and feed area early enough in the season. And you have some unwanted creatures who are moving in. What's the next right. Well, clean up just backtrack and go back to what we said clean up. It would have all of the habitat and all the food. Okay, you've got that fix. And then you really the best thing is mouse traps.

11:47And I did an article for one of the publications I write for and I interviewed one of the leading authorities in the country on wildlife control. And he told me to put out a hundred mouse traps in my tack room. And bait them all but don't set them but put peanut butter in them and bait them off for a couple of days and then set them all one night. And then get it clean out the mice from them the next day and then wait a little bit and do the same thing again. And he and he said literally like a hundred mouse traps. So that's a lot of mouse traps. How interesting. So what you're doing is you're getting letting the creatures get used to the fact that they're there and that they can feed on safely. And then right now we've got you when how successful was it. Oh, it definitely works. It definitely works. But you have to change things up because they're smarter than you would expect and they get used to it.

12:55And having a lot of them is a really good idea. A lot of mouse traps. Yeah. And so then when you capture when you kill the mouse. What I do, just anecdotally, I think I've trained a Kestrel to come and eat them off of one of my friends post. So it's a dead mouse. I've used no poison. But it could be food for a raptor. So we have a Kestrel. I put it up there and it disappears in a day. I put it up on top of the fence post. Someone's eating it. Yeah, and I feel like it leads to poor little. Yeah, mouse isn't going to waste. I want to say that we shouldn't be using poisons. It's they're really not a good idea. They it's putting them into the system and it's just so likely that something else is going to eat it and end up a victim of that poisoning.

14:03So it could be like Kestrel every year. I have one or two Kestrels that die on my property. I think from somebody else using mouse or rat poison. Or I've had dogs. I've gone to other people's barns not knowing that they had rat poison out and my dogs have eaten it and then I've, you know, had a quick trip to the veterinarian as a result. And I know a lot of other people as well. So it's just not a good idea to be putting that poison into the system and mechanical barriers. Or more work for us. We end up having to see a dead mouse and we may not be too excited about that. But it's a healthier environmental outcome than using poisons. But I have other options. Yeah. Well, actually one more trap that your listeners might want to investigate.

15:04If you go online and I think you'd Google mouse trap bucket mouse trap is probably what you'd Google and it's kind of a cool thing. See if I can describe it. It's a you take an old bucket or an old pale. You drill hole in it. You put a piece of rebar with a plastic sleeve around it through that hole. And then you put peanut butter on that hole fill up the bucket with water. And the mouse walks across the rebar and the plastic sleeve to the peanut butter and it spins and it falls into the bucket and drown. Basically, you get to your choice. Do you want to drown the mice and rats? Or do you want to trap in a trap? I'm curious because I have to have many a mouse stuck inside of a feed barrel. And once they get in there, they can't get out. And I wonder if he's an experiment. If you didn't put water in the bottom and they fell down, they wouldn't be able to get back out.

16:08And you could re-locate them. You could take them outside of the woods and say, there you go, dude, moving out. Wild mouse relocation program. Yes, there you go. Excellent solutions there, Elaine. Now, if people have other questions, oh, there's one more. There's another really cool way to control mice and rats that works really well and it's a lot of fun. And that is to invite a barn owl or and or kestrels to your property. So barn owls are excellent at hunting mice and rats and rodents. And kestrels will get large insects like a grasshopper all the way down to or as well as a small mouse or as well as a mouse and other small animals like that. So both of those birds adapt really well to nest boxes. So you can go to your wild bird store or you can go online and get the plans and you can build a kestrel box or a barn owl barn owl box.

17:14And both of those birds are all over North America. In fact, barn owls are on every continent in the world, except for Antarctica. And they're excellent at road and control. Wow, what about that? Yeah, yeah. So just go get the information about them for those who want to do it and it'll tell you which direction to point them and how high up the to point the box and how high up the box needs to be. And you just put it near your barn and then they do the rest. And in fact, they work so well that in the county where I live in Idaho, the county weed and pest. Office will install a barn owl box on your property for $100 and then they monitor it for life to monitor it for activity. They find that barn owls do a such a good job for farmers for road and control that they would be glad to subsidize the balance of the cost to get them out there.

18:24What a great idea. This is just chock a block full of great ideas to help keep your barn pest free in the winter and year round. So this has been a fascinating conversation. Where can people find out more about what you do and the information and courses that you offer? And I have a website. It's horses for clean water. Get in touch with me and I'm glad to do consultations or answer questions. And we also have online online classes as well. So lots of opportunities for folks. Well, there you have it. Horse Radio Network has thousands of engaging podcasts for horse people and you can have them sent right to your phone. Just subscribe to your favorite podcast player. This is Coach Jen and I will be back again soon with another tip. Until then, go ride your horse. The horse radio network and the horse radio network hosts are not responsible for statements paid by guests on the horse tip daily. Please use your own judgment when listening to the tips on this show.

19:31Music