Bite marks on my soap, could it be rat?

[btz]

I check my soap (that's been curing for a while) this morning and found out that some of them have bite marks on them.

This is my 100% rice bran oil with manuka honey, no fragrance:


This is my salt bar with rice bran oil and coconut oil, with lavender eo:

screenshot utility

These are the type and condition:
1. rice bran oil and coconut soap - no bite at all
2. rice bran oil and coconut salt bar, with lavender eo - many bite mark as seen on pic 2
3. rice bran oil with manuka honey soap - many bite mark as seen on pic 1, the worse of them all. All bars have bite marks on them.
4. rice bran oil with manuka honey soap, with peppermint leaves - no bite mark at all
5. lye heavy sweet almond oil soap - 1 or 2 bite mark
6. lye heavy coconut oil soap - 1 or 2 bite mark

I could have sworn that my house is rat-free, but the bite mark seemed to proved me wrong. Sometimes there are cockroaches though, but the bite mark looks like it was from a rat.

My soap also been curing for a while now, the one with manuka honey are in their third week, and I have no problem curing it in their current location, which is in my living room. I think this happened just last night.

Does anyone know how to keep away pest away from your soap? Is naphthalene ball effective?

I cut away the bitten part and for good measure I also 'peel' away the outer layer of the soap. Will this be enough to make sure that there's no pest-related germ stay on my soap? Or should I just throw away the whole bar?

 

[Susie]

I use the plastic snap traps or glue traps to catch rodents. My sis-in-law sometimes gets them in the animal feed. Do NOT use poison, they die in inconvenient places, then you have to live with the smell for 3 weeks. And no smell on earth will chase off rats and mice once they locate a food source.

That looks more like claw marks to me, but I am not an expert.

 

[btz]

now that you mentioned it, it does looks like claw mark. They clawed the soap first and then eat it?

 

[seven]

tikus! zomg! gosh, i loathe them!

you know, from the size of the bite marks, it could very well possibly be rats, or whatever nasty lil critter.
i personally would throw them away. just imagining their nasty (and dirty, you never know what diseases they have) lil self crawling all over the soap is enough to make go for the trash bin.

you have no choice but to catch the damn thing, otherwise no naphtalene ball (kamper) is able to prevent the rat (i'm hoping there was only 1) from returning. rats nowadays are smart. once we put traps with ikan asin in it in my old house, they still manage to get the fish and avoiding the trap altogether, grrrrrr....

 

[btz]

I guess I do need to have rat trap in my house and see whether this is indeed rats. Now that susie talk about claw mark, I was thinking that it might be gaeko (cicak) though. I know that I have plenty of those in my house.

This is so frustrating, maybe I'll try to cure my soaps in different places next time, so if one location is compromised by pest, I won't lose the whole batch.

 

[Lin]

I've had rats as pets, definitely look like rat bite marks to me.

 

[Silverwolf]

Definitely a rat considering the peppermint was untouched which is a natural rodent repellant.

 

[seven]

i dont think it's cicak or geckos (the bigger nasty kind). the feet marks are different. theirs are more spread out.

 

[grayceworks]

Those are rat/rodent teeth marks. They have those long sets of double-teeth in front, very sharp, and constantly growing.

 

[btz]

I guess this was rats after all .

Before I chuck the soaps in the bin, does anyone have an idea on an alternative use for the 'contaminated' soap for? It seemed like a waste to just throw it away. I'll definitely won't use it for my skin or laundry.

 

[Dennis]

Put a chunk of the rice bran with honey soap in a rat trap or...

[ame="http://youtu.be/o5wxqFQj76U"]http://youtu.be/o5wxqFQj76U[/ame]

 

[btz]

Even though the method in the clip is the one that I prefer, my country doesn't allowed the sale of the chosen tools . Rat baits it is then. Thank you for making me laugh Dennis, I need that after the seeing the bite marks.

 

[fuzz-juzz]

Yeap, rats. It does look like their bite marks.
We have a pet rat.

 

[Obsidian]

I'm going with mice, a rat bite would be considerably larger. I'd just chop off the chewed on part on use the soap anyways.

 

[Ruthie]

If you cut off the chewed areas then rebatch any germs would be dead. But I fully understand the desire to toss them. Nasty creatures!

When we first moved into our "new" house, we had a mouse problem, and peppermint oil on cotton balls drove them out. But of course one must refresh that when the smell lessens. Otherwise they will return.

 

[Susie]

Peanut butter is our chosen bait of choice for traps. They can't pick it up and run off with it. They must get in there and try to bite or lick.

 

[paillo]

Back when I was hoarding my favorite bars from other people (before I started making my own), I found mouse bite marks in the water heater utility closet where I kept them. We caught the bad little critter in a mouse-sized Hav-A-Hart trap and set him free in a nearby field. Identical bite marks.

 

[AnnaMarie]

So sorry! That just stinks. I'd be fuming myself....Cut your losses and throw the soap away for safety's sake. I would be leery of even touching it with an unaccounted for rat getting into soap.

Cheers!
Anna Marie
Ps- hope you catch the blasted sucker

 

[Donna]

I also use the Hav-A-Hart trap. We live in the forest. I take mice quite a ways away and release them on the property of a nasty old man who is constantly
causing problems I've found that peppermint or spearmint on cotton balls works quite well in our garage, and the garage smells wonderful!

 

[AustinStraight]

:sad: That's unfortunate... and as Silverwolf mentioned, it's interesting how they didn't bite the peppermint soap - peppermint is used to repel rodents. I'd definitely throw the soaps out, especially if you plan on selling them. I've used peppermint to repel ants and it works amazingly, you can actually draw a circle of peppermint around an ant and they treat it like some kind of minty force-field.