What Do Rats Eat? A Guide To Houston Rodents & Their Feeding Habits

Rats are among the least welcome guests a home or building can have. When there is nothing to eat outside, they come inside looking for food, and a Houston kitchen offers plenty of it. So what do rats eat? And more to the point, how do you stop them eating it in your pantry?

Rats are omnivores, equally comfortable eating plants and animals. Given a choice, most rats lean toward a plant-based diet: fruit, seeds, grain. When the environment limits what is available, they eat anything they can find. A rat in the country lives mostly on seeds and fallen fruit but will not pass up a dead animal. A rat in the city finds fewer plants and eats more meat scraps and garbage, because that is what people leave behind.

Rats are not selective, but they do have favourites. The foods below are the ones they go for first. If you have any of them in your home, a rat will happily eat them. Later we will cover how to stop that. First, a little more about the animal itself.

Rats are rodents, close relatives of mice and considerably more capable. Compared with most animals their size they are intelligent, and their memory is the clearest example. A rat learns the layout of a room and remembers where the food was, so once it has found your pantry it has no trouble finding it again.

They pair that memory with real physical ability. Rats climb trees, fences, brick, and downspouts, and they squeeze through openings far smaller than their bodies look. Both traits make it easier for them to get into a house.

They also have teeth that never stop growing, so a rat has to chew constantly to keep them filed down. A tree works. So does your furniture, your wiring, or the plastic lid on a storage tub.

Rats come in a range of sizes depending on the species. The largest, the Gambian pouched rat of Africa, can reach nearly three feet from nose to tail tip. The rats that live in Texas are much smaller. The Norway rat and the roof rat have bodies six to nine inches long, with a tail roughly as long again. Since those two are the species you will meet in Houston, Austin, and Dallas, they deserve a closer look.

Part of the reason people react so strongly to rats is their reputation for disease, and that reputation is earned. The famous example is the Black Death, which rat fleas helped carry across medieval Europe. Plague still exists, but in the United States today it is a rare disease of wild rodents in the southwest, not something a Houston roof rat carries. The diseases that matter here are less dramatic and far more common:

• Leptospirosis, a bacterial infection spread in rat urine. It contaminates standing water and wet soil, which is why it is a concern in a flood-prone city, and it can cause fever, headache, muscle pain, and in serious cases liver and kidney problems.
• Salmonellosis, from food or surfaces contaminated by rat droppings. Diarrhea, fever, and abdominal cramps.
• Rat-bite fever, from the bacteria in a rat's mouth, following a bite or scratch. Fever, joint pain, and rash.
• Murine typhus, carried by the fleas that live on rats and reported every year in Texas. Fever, headache, and rash.

Rats also bring fleas and mites into a house with them, which is a problem of its own once the rats are gone. With that list in mind, keeping rats out is worth the effort. Here is how.

If you have found evidence of rats, the foods they prefer tell you what to put in a trap. Chocolate and peanut butter are the reliable choices, with nuts, dried fruit, and bacon close behind. Rats taste a small amount of anything new before they commit to it, so set out two or three baits for a night or two without a trap and see which one gets taken. Then use that one.

Pay attention to size and shape. Leave bait in pieces small enough for a rat to hold in its paws, and press soft baits like peanut butter into the trigger so the rat has to work at it rather than lick it off. Thin strips are easier for a rat to carry and more likely to trip the trap.