The rat trap: The most overlooked addition to any BoB

I read a lot of the posts here in the Survival Forums and there is always some great information and ideas on here and I always learn something new or get a new idea for survival tactics. One thing I would like to bring up that I have never seen anyone discuss is the rat trap. It is a Swiss Army Knife of traps, is very cheap to buy and very easy to store.

During my military career I went through several survival schools, up to SERE Level C and had continuing training after my initial schools and learned a great deal of pertinent information. However even back then one thing I would never deploy without having in my pack was a couple of rat traps. Their uses are almost limitless and not only for conventional traps, they are also very useful for improvised booby traps as well.

I have used rat traps to catch small mammals such as squirrels, musk rat, mink, ferret, rabbit, and others with just the trap itself and bait. They can also be used for deadfall traps and various noose traps for larger game animals by substituting the rat trap for your trigger mechanism at the base and attaching your leader line to the trap. The great thing about having a couple of rat or even mouse traps in your BoB is that it is much simpler to make a trigger mechanism out of the trap than it is to carve a trigger and base. Depending on what you are attempting to trap they can many times also be an effective substitute for the engine of various traps.

The same holds true for booby traps and perimeter warning devices. The rat trap can be used as a trigger mechanism or engine for certain booby traps with a trip line made of string or wire attached to the trigger pad of the trap. I'm not going to go into much more detail on the making of booby traps because I don't want a T&C violation but anyone who has researched this subject can pretty much figure it out.

This past winter I spent quite a lot of time perfecting the use of rat traps for catching game birds and even some water fowl. By finding pheasant trails in our corn, sunflower, soybean, and wheat fields here I was able to place several rat traps out with baits such as sunflower, corn, and soybean and when the birds come in to get the bait they trigger the trap which breaks their neck and you have dinner.

I also did the same thing with duck and teal, though not as effective I was able to catch quite a few in my traps and found that they were effective for small water fowl as well. I would suggest securing the traps to either a tree, fencepost, or stake driven into the ground just in case you don't get a good catch and the animal doesn't die. You don't want an injured animal getting away with a trap attached to it and be in pain.

I have attached some photos of the various birds I was able to catch in the traps.


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This was the first pheasant I caught in one of the traps.


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This is another pheasant I caught in one of the traps. The 2 ducks in the center were not trapped, I shot them while going out to check my traps. The bird on the right side of the picture is a Teal that I caught in one of the traps.


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This is the 2 pheasant that I caught in my traps plus one my son shot on his way home from school, all dressed up and ready to cook. 3 pheasant with rice and gravy, a great meal for our family of 7. It was a good meal like many we eat year round that was healthy, absent of hormones and antibiotics and cost us about $5 to make and would be readily available to us or anyone else in a survival situation even if we didn't have access to firearms to hunt with.

reply to post by Nucleardiver

That's an excellent idea. Having taken survival training at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station back in 69 or 70, we learned some excellent snaring and trapping skills, but who carries a rat trap behind enemy lines? Today though, my BOB has a new item to include! Thank you!

Why not just put one in front of the white house?

Excellent idea. I have 2 large ones in my BoB and have for years. I have caught many a squirrel and other small mammal; even a snake once though the trap only caught him it didn't kill him. I may add 2 small ones as trigger mechanisms. I never thought about that before.

very inventive thinking, thanks for the heads up I'll be getting some pretty soon myself

Mouse traps may be essential if you live in an area known to harbor Hantavirus. You can eat mice too - just singe the hair off and eat them bones and all. Not for the squeamish but little in real survival is. You take what you can get to keep you alive.
Can't be beat as trigger mechanisms for alarms or boobytraps.
Remember, you do have to have some kind of bait the animal you're trying to catch will want. This is why you don't throw away organs or blood from any kills. Save the fur and feathers too.

my son shot on his way home from school

Ok, I am confused here.

How is it that your son has a gun (I'm assuming shot gun because of it being a bird) on his person while returning from school?

I like the idea of the traps tho...great addition to any BOB.

Peace

reply to post by jude11


Because we live in a state that recognizes your 2nd amendment right and as long as the gun is secured in a vehicle it is allowed on school grounds. He was 15 this winter and drives himself to school and work. In North Dakota you could get your drivers license at age 14 but they changed the law this year to require you to have your permit for 1 full year instead of 6 months before getting a license.

We also only have 3 LEO's in the county, are a very small county population wise (2500 people) and don't live under a constant police state. During hunting season all of the kids go hunting on their way home from school in the afternoons, and honestly school is closed on the first day of Pheasant season because there is only 200 and some odd students in the entire school and when 75% of the kids take off that day its cheaper for the school to close for the day.

And yes all of our children have their own guns, shotguns for bird hunting and rifles, mostly .308 Remingtons for deer and elk.

Originally posted by Nucleardiver
reply to post by jude11

 

Because we live in a state that recognizes your 2nd amendment right and as long as the gun is secured in a vehicle it is allowed on school grounds. He was 15 this winter and drives himself to school and work. In North Dakota you could get your drivers license at age 14 but they changed the law this year to require you to have your permit for 1 full year instead of 6 months before getting a license.

We also only have 3 LEO's in the county, are a very small county population wise (2500 people) and don't live under a constant police state. During hunting season all of the kids go hunting on their way home from school in the afternoons, and honestly school is closed on the first day of Pheasant season because there is only 200 and some odd students in the entire school and when 75% of the kids take off that day its cheaper for the school to close for the day.

And yes all of our children have their own guns, shotguns for bird hunting and rifles, mostly .308 Remingtons for deer and elk.

edit on 10-6-2013 by Nucleardiver because: (no reason given)

Nice!

I was born and raised in Northern Canada and your home sounds a lot like mine. My first rifle was a single shot bolt action .22 when I was 8 yrs old that my dad won in curling. I then had a 410 for birds when I turned 10.

Good times my friend.

Peace

Originally posted by Nucleardiver
...the rat trap. It is a Swiss Army Knife of traps, is very cheap to buy and very easy to store.
...

Thank you, Nucleardiver
Never heard of such a thing - don't know anything about them...but, now I want to.
Appreciate all the information you posted!

reply to post by jude11


Im about 100 miles from the Canadian border, moved here almost 2 years ago from central Florida and love it here. It's like being in a different country, no police state and intrusions, no over population, and a very friendly way of life. I should have came here 20 years ago.

Originally posted by Nucleardiver
reply to post by jude11

 

Im about 100 miles from the Canadian border, moved here almost 2 years ago from central Florida and love it here. It's like being in a different country, no police state and intrusions, no over population, and a very friendly way of life. I should have came here 20 years ago.

I see you are in ND. Been there and spent some time in Fargo. I was amazed at how many beautiful blond women live there and found it was the Scandinavian heritage.

And was even more surprised when I discovered that the movie "Fargo" and the amusing accent portrayed is not too far from the truth. I thought it was just the movie.

Peace

I lived in an urban apartment complex and caught mice in my apartment using a vacuum cleaner hosepipe. Little critter ran into one end of it, with the other end sealed off

There are dozens of different home-made humane mouse traps: There's the frying pan/plate, glass dish, peanut butter and kebab skewer. The skewer is folded in half and smeared with peanut butter. Thats used as a tripwire to prop up the upside-down glass-dish over the plate. Mouse goes for the peanut butter, springs the trap and is caught.

Other versions are built from plastic buckets, old plastic bottles and the mandatory peanut butter:
www.squidoo.com...

Originally posted by Nucleardiver
I read a lot of the posts here in the Survival Forums and there is always some great information and ideas on here and I always learn something new or get a new idea for survival tactics. One thing I would like to bring up that I have never seen anyone discuss is the rat trap. It is a Swiss Army Knife of traps, is very cheap to buy and very easy to store.

During my military career I went through several survival schools, up to SERE Level C and had continuing training after my initial schools and learned a great deal of pertinent information. However even back then one thing I would never deploy without having in my pack was a couple of rat traps. Their uses are almost limitless and not only for conventional traps, they are also very useful for improvised booby traps as well.

I have used rat traps to catch small mammals such as squirrels, musk rat, mink, ferret, rabbit, and others with just the trap itself and bait. They can also be used for deadfall traps and various noose traps for larger game animals by substituting the rat trap for your trigger mechanism at the base and attaching your leader line to the trap. The great thing about having a couple of rat or even mouse traps in your BoB is that it is much simpler to make a trigger mechanism out of the trap than it is to carve a trigger and base. Depending on what you are attempting to trap they can many times also be an effective substitute for the engine of various traps.

The same holds true for booby traps and perimeter warning devices. The rat trap can be used as a trigger mechanism or engine for certain booby traps with a trip line made of string or wire attached to the trigger pad of the trap. I'm not going to go into much more detail on the making of booby traps because I don't want a T&C violation but anyone who has researched this subject can pretty much figure it out.

This past winter I spent quite a lot of time perfecting the use of rat traps for catching game birds and even some water fowl. By finding pheasant trails in our corn, sunflower, soybean, and wheat fields here I was able to place several rat traps out with baits such as sunflower, corn, and soybean and when the birds come in to get the bait they trigger the trap which breaks their neck and you have dinner.

I also did the same thing with duck and teal, though not as effective I was able to catch quite a few in my traps and found that they were effective for small water fowl as well. I would suggest securing the traps to either a tree, fencepost, or stake driven into the ground just in case you don't get a good catch and the animal doesn't die. You don't want an injured animal getting away with a trap attached to it and be in pain.

I have attached some photos of the various birds I was able to catch in the traps.


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This was the first pheasant I caught in one of the traps.


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This is another pheasant I caught in one of the traps. The 2 ducks in the center were not trapped, I shot them while going out to check my traps. The bird on the right side of the picture is a Teal that I caught in one of the traps.


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This is the 2 pheasant that I caught in my traps plus one my son shot on his way home from school, all dressed up and ready to cook. 3 pheasant with rice and gravy, a great meal for our family of 7. It was a good meal like many we eat year round that was healthy, absent of hormones and antibiotics and cost us about $5 to make and would be readily available to us or anyone else in a survival situation even if we didn't have access to firearms to hunt with.

I thought everyone came to the consensus that prepping and the bug out bag aren't really going to help you at all if SHTF. Lol. If you think you need a bug out bag, why not just leave now while everything is calm. Plus you can do it without anyone knowing.

In fact. why not have all people with bug out bags form a community and move to a safe local offshore immediately. Why risk you and your families lives and wait till things really get bad. Logically waiting with a BOB is insane if you really beleive an event will happen.

I agree that is satisfying to shoot yard birds and trap house rodents so you can feel self sufficient though.

reply to post by LastStarfighter

I thought everyone came to the consensus that prepping and the bug out bag aren't really going to help you at all if SHTF.

I am not trying to argumentative, I would just like to understand the reasoning behind your statement.

Who is this "everyone" that you speak of? Is this "everyone" that you speak of the people who sit by in denial, thinking that everything is going to be okay for ever? Would you please explain how preparing and having supplies on hand that are needed to survive in an emergency situation or a SHTF situation is not going to help anyone?

"Failure to prepare is preparing to fail", this is something that was instilled into me while going through my various survival training courses in the Navy and is very true.

I do not claim to be an "expert" in survival, however I have been very well trained and that training not only includes my military training but also my skills as an Eagle Scout and things my father taught all of his children about living off the land while we were growing up. I am however quite certain that my knowledge and skills in survival would surpass many and I have had to put my skills to the test several times both while in service and as a civilian.

I agree that is satisfying to shoot yard birds and trap house rodents so you can feel self sufficient though.

I do not do what I do in an attempt to feel self sufficient. My family and I moved to ND from central FL almost 2 years ago for many reasons, the biggest reason was to get back to basics and be more self sufficient. We bought a quarter of land (40 acres) with an old homestead on it and since buying the land we have become self sufficient.

Our property is paid for free and clear and we only have to pay a very small tax fee each year which is roughly $500. Since buying the land I have made several wind turbines out of 24 volt 450 amp Delco alternators and have a battery bank and inverter/switching station and we have been off the power grid since September of 2012. We heat our home with a wood/coal burning furnace that also heats our water for bathing since the furnace can also act as a boiler for backup heat.

We grow and raise all of our veggies and meat as well as eggs with the exception of fruits, and supplement our food supplies by hunting and fishing. Once every 2 months we make the 100 mile round trip to town to the grocery store for items such as condiments and sugar, although we rarely use sugar since we have a readily available supply of honey.

We smoke and salt cure all of our meats and what wont go in the freezer gets put in the cellar and the same is true of our veggies, we can what won't stay fresh in the root cellar. We have several cows and sheep that we butcher each year for our meat and last year we got 5 deer and probably 70 pheasant and numerous ducks and geese. We kept track of our grocery store receipts since we went off the power grid in September and as of the first of May we had spent a total of $738 at the grocery store. Keep in mind this is for a family of 5, there are 7 of us total but my wifes children were in FL with their dad for part of the winter.

If we absolutely had to, and if left up to me I wouldn't even go to the grocery store but with my wife and kids we go to get certain things we can't provide off the land or our farm. We get wheat, sunflower seeds, corn, and oats from the farmers around us by trading out work on their equipment in exchange for the items. We make our own breads from the wheat and oats by grinding them in an antique grinding mill that I purchased at a local auction for $25 and refurbished and converted to electric.

We also went all winter with no internet and the only television we had was broadcast which was only 3 channels. Now that the freeze is over we had satellite internet installed and rely on that for watching TV. The point is that I am not trying to feel self sufficient, I am living it. If something happened tomorrow and I could not work or the entire system were to collapse, other than the possibility of looters, it really wouldn't effect us from a sustainability stand point because we have our safe local.

I do what I do in an attempt to raise our children in a slower paced life and let them see that there is a different life out there than being glued to video games or sitting in front of the TV. The things I post in this forum are just ideas I have tried and want to share with others so that some day if they find themselves in a bad situation they may have some ideas and tools to help them survive. It's also real nice not to have to depend on another for your basic needs, to me that is the real definition of freedom.

Oh, and I still have a couple of MOLLE packs sitting in the mudroom that are our BoB's so that if we had to bailout from here we could head out to the prairie and be able to survive.

The BoB might bot be the best of help, but it's the skills you learn from having a BoB that are priceless.
Most everyday items we need and use can be made another way than the way you buy it.

Love this rat trap idea, it's a multi functional mutli purpose multi catch boB favorite.

reply to post by jude11


Yeah if you like blonde hair, blue eyed women this is the place to be. The heritage here is mostly German and Scandinavian and there are some beautiful women in this area. My wife is of Scandinavian and Norwegian descent so she fits right in, but my Irish descent with pale skin and reddish hair and beard, I stand out big time!

I had also seen the movie Fargo several times and thought the accent was just in the movie but it's not. In fact my first night up here that movie was on the TV when I turned it on in my hotel room. Im located about 2/3 of the way between Bismarck and Fargo, you get that accent more in Fargo but we still get it here a lot to. It still cracks me up when I here people talk like that, but then again I catch crap over saying "y'all" all the time, or "I'm fixin' to go....".

reply to post by Nucleardiver


DUDE.. when my brother and I were considering making survival packs and taking a long camping trip I put a rat trap on my list. I don't know why I never considered making a thread on it, but it is perfect for catching rodents in desperate situations. I have never put it to the test though.. wonder if a squirrel could outsmart it?

Great idea - got some snare wire already but I'm not sure why a rat trap never occurred to me before! Thanks!

Excellent idea, Ive had my BoB packed up for a long time, and I'm glad I read this post. One more very useful item to add. Ive had snares, and some traps in my BoB already, but this makes a lot of sense, and the trap is already made, just set-up.

As for the post that asked for everyone with a BoB pack to go ahead and move away, you are obviously not well informed. The BoB is packed for emergencies, so you dont get caught with your pants down. It has nothing to do, with thinking that we are better than anyone else, just prepeared to face hardships if we had to. I can guarrantee that people a hundred years ago, would have many items stored away, and would fully agree that being prepared is the name of the game. nothing is guarranteed when the system fails.