Air Rifle Rat Shooting With Night Vision

If you’ve read our Pest Profile on the Common or “Norway Rat,” then you are already aware of just how invasive and deleterious a pest this species is. Controlling their populations with an air rifle is a very humane way of mitigating their impact, especially because it is laser-specific, unlike poisons that can kill native wildlife and pets just as easily as rats.

The video above is a good demonstration of how to hunt runts within an infested structure. Among other things, I appreciate how patient and careful the shooter was; notice he took only clear head-shots. In this particular case, his conservative approach also minimized the risk of a miss and likely ricochet issues as there were many metal tanks/piping in this old barn.

Hunting in the evening with night vision is probably the best way to get clear shots, since rats are largely nocturnal. However, if you like many can’t afford a good night vision scope, no worries because rats are also “crepuscular” (active around dusk), meaning you also have a good hour or two of shooting around sunset…as long as your standard air rifle optics are bright and clear.

The individual above set a “Nutella” feeding area to try and lure rats into a good location (I never tried this but peanut butter is also easy to use and always seems to work for me). But notice that he was also successful hunting around the livestock feeding areas and associated points of ingress/egress in the vicinity.

Overall, a very good example of responsible and humane air rifle pest control.