Boric acid works great for roaches.

>Actual "ant chalk" that works is a Chinese import containing pyrethroid as a contact poison.

Not true. Ant chalk has one active ingredient: boric acid. It kills the ants (and cockroaches) but nothing else. It is pet-safe. In fact, you can buy boric acid powder for this in many hardware stores. The problem is that powder doesn't work because they don't run over piles of powder.

 Anybody have any of these great tricks for deer? Nothing seems to work. I'm running a damned deer sanctuary in my back yard. I've actually considered buying a dog (shudder).

Odd that so many of these tricks involve animals eating something and swelling up, dying a horrible death.

That rat in a barrel trick is pretty brutal. It reminds me of a similar trap that pioneers supposedly used involving a rotating paddle atop a water-filled bucket with food on the outlying axis. When the critters walk out to the edge of the paddle, it flips them in the water.

Has anyone seen that squirrel/birdfeeder quicktime that gets sent around? A big spring-loaded arm flings the squirrel about 300 ft. when he nibbles on the feed.

A lot of folks get fooled on the chalk trick. Regular chalk doesn't do anything. Actual "ant chalk" that works is a Chinese import containing pyrethroid as a contact poison. Since this insecticide isn't EPA-approved for sale in the US, you won't find it in K-Mart. Try your local Chinatown and wear gloves when drawing your battle lines--it's nasty stuff.

I've tried chalk to stop ants. It didn't work for me. I even put an ant in the middle of a circle I drew with chalk. It walked up to the line, sniffed it, and crawled right over it.

Edited by author 02-04-2002 10:04 AM
When I was a kid, I lived on a farm. One of my jobs was to rid the hay barns of rats.

I think this came from the fact that I was afraid of rats, and my father said we should confront our fears (this was the mid seventies if that helps).

We discovered a couple of fool proof ways to do this task. First was to get my mother to fry chopped wine cork in the juices of cooked minced beef. We would sprinkle this in the walkways and tracks and the rats would happily eat it and wander off home. The cork swelled up inside them, and they died a horrible death. (I didn't say these were nice ways to kill rats, btw.)

The other way took more planning, and was even more evil. We took an oak barrel, and placed a house brick standing on it's end at the bottom, and filled the barrel with water up to the level of the brick. Then we covered the barrel with a tarpaulin and sprinkled a big pile of seed on the tarp. A plank leaning against the side of the barrel made a walkway up to the top of the barrel and we sprinkled grain down the plank.

First rat comes in, sees the trail of grain, follows it up the barrel and sits there, eating his fill. Rats, being social animals, share the wealth, and pretty soon they get used to using this new eating hole.

After a few days, we cut an X in the cop of the tarp, almost to the edge of the barrel, and put a ring of grain around the top of the barrel so it looks normal from the ground.

First rat comes back, scampers up the plank and sploshes into the water. Being a social beast, he cries and cries and cries and a rescuer will come.

He sploshes into the water and find that there's only enough room on that brick for one rat.


So they forget about rescue and fight to the death. This carries on and you are left with a barn with no rats, a barrel full of dead rats and one, mean nasty king rat sitting on the pile.

At this point, the barrel was dragged into the courtyard and torched.

Or learn to live in harmony with the ants. You can try this solution with lice as well.

Bleach sounds good, but for pure aesthetics, the idea of outlining windows with chalk is muy Warholian. I've tried most of the gopher hole tricks. Juicyfruit. Juicyfruit wrapped around Ex-lax - leftover from Halloween. Dog hair. Fish heads. Kitty litter. They're all great. Not one works on the bastards.

The seagull thing might be a myth.

More on ant control: Wipe down the little paths they take from their hidey-holes to food sources with watered-down bleach. This eliminates the pheromone trails they navigate with. I did this last summer, and it worked like a charm. They had laid out a path from an entry under the stove to my garbage pail, where I'd foolishly left a scrap of odiferous salmon skin. The path was a virtual four-lane highway of ants. I vacuumed up the ants, then scrubbed the trail.

The only paths I didn't eliminate were the ones leading to the bait-traps.

Edited by author 02-04-2002 01:05 AM
Follow your house ants back to their nest. Sprinkle the area liberally with dry corn meal. The ants will store it and eat it. Its excessive dryness will swell them up and finally kill them.

Same with annoying seagulls. Throw them Alka-Seltzer. They'll happily catch it mid-air and eat it. They don't burp and so will 'blow up' (it's not as cool/disgusting as it sounds) and die.

Activated charcoal (the stuff you get at the fish store) will absorb bad odors.

And so on....

Coffee grounds make a GREAT hand cleaner. The particles have an immense surface area, are wet, and slightly acidic. Grab a half-handfull, "scrub" your hands with them over a sink, and chances are whatever was gunking up yer paws will be gone. *and* the coffee oils leave your hands moisturized.

Try it! Even works on epoxy.