There's a rat in the kitchen now what you gonna do

Today I went to the hangar to load up the family for a nice 3 day weekend down to San Diego, the kids were fired up for Legoland! When Dina opened up the baggage door to put in some bags she saw little rat droppings all over the inside on my plane. Doh! The plane was closed up, the door was closed and also the storm window. The droppings were in the baggage area, the middle row and also in the front. Even a few on the seats. My last flight was a night flight, so it could have been there then and I mightn't have noticed. Checking for rat dropping is not normally part of my preflight! Anyway I decided to err on the side of caution and scrubbed the trip. The kids were so disappointed! I just don't like the idea of a rat's nest in my plane, and who knows if they have chewed on some wiring or done other damage...

I pulled the inspection panel in the tail cone and the tail looked clean from what I could see. I pulled the rug from the baggage compartment and opened that inspection panel too... no nests or rats that I could see. I pulled the rug from the middle row and pulled the inspection panel under the emergency gear extension handle, nothing. I pulled out the co-pilot seat and couldn't see anything up in the rudder pedal area either. I called my super IA Pi and he is coming tomorrow morning and going to help me do a more thorough inspection and make sure they're not hidden away somewhere wreaking havoc.  


I also put a rat trap in the plane, put rat poison around the hangar, and bought two of those electric sonic rat-be-gone devices.  I then found out from researching online that setting out poison is the wrong thing to do.. they eat the poison and then die in the plane.  So I'll pull that up tomorrow and ditch it.  I'm also looking into a new hangar, after two black widows and now the rats...  I'm also going to try the $10 CSOBeech suggestion here: http://www.csobeech.com/RodentControl.html. Considering I just spend $40 on the rat traps, poison and sonic devices, I'll do my research first next time.