Most people are surprised to learn that while dogs and cats are usually seen as a natural enemy of rodents, rats can present a number of health problems and dangers to these common pets. Many farmers have traditionally kept cats and a dog or two to help ward off and reduce rodent populations.
Rodents can destroy crops, eat grain, nest in the hay, and cause a threat to pets and livestock. In order to understand how serious the rodent threat to dogs and cats is, you need to know something about rats in particular.
Rats Will Run, but They Really Aren’t Afraid
Rats are rodents and it is their nature to run when they see larger animals heading in their direction. However, rats are not nearly as timid and afraid of bigger animals as their mice cousins. In fact, if you corner a rat, it may just attempt to defend itself by leaping at and biting you. This is often what happens when a dog or cat corners a rat — and a rat’s bite is a carrier of many major diseases.
When a rat bites your dog or cat, it can transmit a number of diseases through the rat’s saliva into the wound of the bite. If your dog or cat is not up to date with all current shots, it may fall ill, infect others, or worse.
Leptospirosis in Cats and Dogs
Simply known as “lepto” in veterinary medicine, it generally doesn't do a lot of harm to cattle and rats. It does affect their kidneys such that they urinate quite a bit and it can lead to dehydration, kidney disease, or death if left untreated. While you may treat livestock for lepto, you’re not going to treat any rats in your barn or stable.
Leptospirosis in cats and dogs, however, is another story. It is not only damaging to their urinary systems, but they can also transmit it to humans and other pets in the household. The internal damage it causes is severe enough in some cases to cripple the affected animals or humans and lead to death. Preventing lepto is your best bet, as treating it is difficult and costly. The best prevention, of course, is catching and dispatching as many rats and mice on your property as you can.
Hantavirus
Hantavirus is a very serious disease carried in infected rats and rat droppings. Oddly enough, dogs can develop antibodies to the virus, and cats don’t seem particularly affected either. The problem comes when these animals kill infected rats or bring their kills to your doorstep as “presents” and introduce the virus to you.
Hantavirus weakens blood cells and causes major pulmonary damage in humans, if you survive it. Putting a different option in place to catch and kill rats removes the possibility that your pets will wander around your property killing something that is infected and bringing it back to you. Additionally, if they have the virus and bite you and break the skin, or they walk through infected rat droppings and then scratch you, you could become infected.
Toxoplasmosis
If you’ve ever been pregnant, or you’ve heard pregnant women talking about how they can’t change the litter box, then you know a little about toxoplasmosis. It’s a disease that starts in rodents, migrates to hunting cats, and finally ends up in humans when humans clean the litter boxes of infected cats. The cat is the intermediate host between rats and humans, and the disease can cause serious health risks to pregnant women and lethal risks to an unborn baby.
Women who have cats at home are often tested during pregnancy to make sure they have not contracted toxoplasmosis. Yet the best way to prevent it is to not allow cats to hunt rodents at all — and kill the rodents as quickly as you can. There are some excellent and quick-kill traps available on the market for just that purpose.
You should also know that dogs are rarely carriers of this disease, and even if they do have it, you’d almost never know it. Given that most dog owners don’t scoop dog feces with their bare hands, the risk is particularly low for contracting toxoplasmosis from dogs.
Rat Bite Fever
Even though it sounds made-up, it isn’t. If you stop to think of all the vile stuff rats eat — and that their mouths are essentially rotting garbage disposals — you can understand why a bite from a rat can cause quite a nasty, fever-producing infection.
If you’re lucky, the rat isn’t hoarding nasty bacteria in its mouth that can cause rat bite fever. If your cat or dog isn’t so lucky, it may require treatment to eliminate the bacteria from the bite wound(s) and the body.
Fleas and Ticks
Rats go everywhere. They scurry through high grasses, trees, and even sewers. Along the way they pick up blood-sucking parasites that will jump from a dead rat onto your live dog or cat when they realize their rodent host is no longer a meal.
Along with the transference of the parasites, whatever the parasites are carrying is transferred as well — including Lyme disease and plague. These are diseases humans can also contract from the fleas and ticks brought back into the home by dogs or cats that killed infected rats. Pre-treating pets for fleas and ticks and keeping them from chasing and killing rodents goes a long way.
Other Rat Diseases
There are other rat diseases that are either directly or indirectly transmitted to dogs and cats and then to humans. Prevention is essential to stopping your pets from contracting these diseases and/or lifelong illnesses that can affect their quality of life.
Since some of these diseases can also be transferred to you, it’s in your best interest to take all necessary measures to eliminate rodents from your property before they can harm your pets, your family, and you. If you want to know more about traps we offer, contact us today at www.automatictrap.com.