Who shoots rats at your local garbage dump or landfill and what do you use to shoot them?

We don't have the dumps like we used to. DEQ and EPA put an end to that. Back when we did when I was younger I popped many a rat into eternity with a .22 pump. The ultimate "pop up" target.

Wow, that question brings back memories. The dumps of my youth are long gone, probably for the better, but we used to plink them with an old Remington single shot .22. I know one guy who liked to use an old German MP-40, a/k/a Schmeiser, 9mm. That was some kinda rat killer!

When I lived on City Island as a kid, my dad would take us at dusk to the dump between the island and Pelham Bay...he'd badge the guard, and we would park down the road and open the car doors for rests...then as it started to get dark, the rats would come out of the woods and cross the road to the dump to eat...we would have the headlights on and me and my brother would blast them with our .22s...once one got killed the rest came to feed....by the end of the night, there would be a pile of rats in the road...good times good times...

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Thirty characters. Exactly...

Not been rat hunting in many a year. As stated above all the good rat hunting places have been cleaned up.

Have used 22 rifles and pistols, shotguns, a varied selection of class 3 weapons ( 9mm Sten gun, M16, American 180, Uzi ect)

Had a buddy several years ago that wanted to get some property out in the county and start his own trash dump, capture some rats and have weekly rat hunts. He never went forward with the idea.

20 years back we used .22's and shotguns. The .22 was the most fun if you had a decent spot light. The shotgun worked every time good or bad light! Sadly I dont know of anyplace that has open landfills or one you can take a gun to.

It was a LOT of fun.

I'm reporting this thread to Peta.

Back when I was just a young whippersnapper some 40 years ago my friends and I hunted rats in the dump with BB guns and home made spears. I use a Crosman 760 pumper and a broomstick with a large sharpened gutter nail epoxied in the end. We used to kill hundreds at a time yet never put a dent in their population.

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Regards,
Guy-Harold Smith II

It has been years since since I went rat hunting. They closed all the prime hunting areas (dumps/land fills) in our area years ago.

We hunted them with .22 semi-autos (rifles & pistols), .22 Hornets, shotguns, hunting rifles, etc. The hunting was the best a night when the dump was set on fire to burn the trash as the light from fire made spotting and hitting the little critters a lot easier.

Those were the good old days!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can also remember as a child watching the pigeon shoots at the courthouse on Thanksgiving and Christmas.

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Proverbs 14:7

Good thing you didn't have rat shoots at the public buildings.

Many politicians would have been in danger of getting hit!

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Good life will not Heaven get!

I've never shot them at the dump, but when I was a kid I used to shoot'em off the wood stack at home with my BB gun.

I' from north Alabama...we did not have a dump we had black birds...my dad had an old savage auto..sawed barrel off(was full choke)..killed hundreds...

Barrett M107 .50 Caliber sniper rifle.

I got arrested, well not really arrested, when I was about 10 or 12 years old for shooting rats on the dump. Me and my buddy were walking to the dump with our 22's when a police car stopped us on the way. We had to ride to the police station where they called my Dad who came and picked us up. We din't get in any trouble, they gave us our guns back and my Pop just laughed. The other kid with me was the mayors son. Years later I got hired by the same police dept. and one day I remembered that day so I searched the old files. Darn if I din't find the file on that after all them years, it was so funny and it made me think of the days when I was a kid.

They told me stuff like that would stay on my "permanent record" but I didn't believe it!

This is a thread for my memory lane, it has been 30 years since I used rats for target practice. It wasn't really a dump but a remote location the county used to discard brush and trimmed tree limbs. I used a Ruger Blackhawk in .357 and a M1 30 carbine. That was some great fun.
Steve

50 years ago they would put road flares into something at the dump in Hobart, IN and a lot of men with .22s and .410s would shoot rats. My dad was one of the .410 guys with an old (then) single shot. I wish I had that shotgun.

I worked with a woman who claimed to be a Peta member. I asked her if her house was full of mice and rats.
She said NO!
I told her she wasn't doing her part... I really think she was considering it.

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In dog years I'm dead.

Brings back memories of the dump off Sandpit Rd on the Niagara escarpment. We shot the rats with ~150 gr surplus 30-06 ammo from Lake City 1943, then 13-15 years old.. Rifle was a Springfield '03-A4 [not a typo] that had a [memory?] Springfield gov't sporter style stock [M1922M1 "Issue"] and a 50s receiver sight [yes, D&T'd].

My ears still ring, as we initially used no hearing protection. Later used empty .38 Special cases stuck in ears.

Those days were long ago and vehicular access was in '31 Ford Tudor!

Regards,

Dyson

In the 1950s we had a village dump anyone could go to. Shot rats at it, and dad would throw bottels in the air for me. I got pretty good at it for awhile.

I used my Dad's old model 68 Winchester 22rf single shot with peep sight. It was not a dump but a fenced in chicken lot that usually had corn left from feeding the chickens. I would set nearby and wait for dusk and they would come out to eat and then it was curtains for them. I still have that old rifle but no chickens or rats.

No recipes?

When we were young’uns, my brother and I decided it would be fun to shoot rats in the hay barn. One evening after our parents had gone into town we got a flashlight, dad’s .22 cal. revolver and a box of hollow points. There was rat-shot in the cabinet but my brother thought it would be a lot more fun to try and knock them off the rafters with solid lead.

Next day, dad called us into the barn. When we looked up there were tiny beams of light coming through tiny holes in the metal roof. We got a trip to the woodshed over that stunt. And I can tell you, patching a barn roof is no fun either.

I strongly feel that hunters should eat what they kill.

When I was a kid growing up in the Adirondacks Rat Shooting at the dump was a great social event. I can remember mounds of old green and red Remington .22 short boxes. We used to backlight them with burning rubbish...

We'd usually have to quit however when the Black Bears showed up to pick things over.

Those were good times...for us, not the rats... I suppose the world is better off without the rat infested dumps that gave us so much shooting enjoyment, but it was a great way to spend an afternoon shooting up boxes of 22lr. Almost as much fun as an African safari.

I remember making bunkers out of cardboard boxes or sitting in an old refrigerator to ambush the rodents. My memories are better then any African safari I could ever go on. It was a City Dump Safari !!!!

Many moon's ago it was wrist rocket sling shots with marbles, at nite we used head lamps, taped our pants legs. My buddy had one run up inside his pans and we hauled him to the Dr.

i have shot a few rats in my day but...in this area we would load up in a john boat and put in the appomattox river...it's infested with cotton mouths...we troll along the shore very slowly and shoot them out of low hanging bushes and tree limbs...two of us could shoot about 50 of them in a few hours....

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SWCA#2208
KK4EMO

30 odd years ago I used to with my 30/30 winchester. Lots of fun but sometimes those 30/30's would just punch right through. Pretty amazing to stand there and shoot 3, 4 or even 5 shots into a rat and just have it stand there taking it.

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SWCA 1646

I had to chuckle on this one-
The Blandford Mass. dump-'55-'60.
We used everything we had up to a Garand!
Lots of Smiths and Winchesters too.
Thousands of rounds.

Good shooting.

It's probably been about forty five years since I've shot rats at a city dump. That really brings back memories.

The most memorable shoots would be on cold, crisp fall nights, after dark. Usually there were little fires burning all over the dump and that created that never to be forgotten odor....of a burning garbage!

If you would remain quite, you would hear the "tinkle" of broken glass and tin cans as the rats ran through the dump. Then just put a flash light on the "tinkle" and you would have one of them little buggers in the beam. Next, send him off to rat eternity and revel in that smell of rim fire ammunition.

(Do you guys remember what .22 ammo used to smell like? It not the same today. As a kid I used to pull the bullets and powder out of a rim fire and then ignite the primer. The best way for me to describe the odor was that of "grapefruit"!....Ah, just a little side note and digression........)

I think that days of rat shooting at the public dump are over for ever. I don't even know of one you could get into today...at night. My last experiences were at dumps in small, rural communities.

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G.P. Charlie

We didn't go to the dump (we didn't have to). I used to watch for the rats to come to the hog feeder and shoot them with a pellet rifle. My dad told me he used to spotlight them around the corn crib and shoot them with rat shot from a .22 pump.

Chubbs