Our girl cat brought a rat she’d either killed or found already dead to our patio (she hasn’t done this for a few years).

As the wife and I discussed how best to dispose of it, we saw to our horror 3 large, purplish-black (2cm x 1.5cm?) fat larval things emerge from the rat’s abdomen. A quick web search (‘Vancouver Island rat botfly’) shows matching images. Eyyyyyych.

I bagged the carcass and captured the larvae in a jar for the moment… there’s a burn ban at the moment, so I can’t do that, but I don’t just want to throw them in the trash either so

  • Is burying them sufficient?
  • Are our two cats in any danger of infection? (I phoned our vet, no answer from them yet)
  • Should we notify the town pest control dept.?

There are lots of cats in the area besides our own, so we thought rats weren’t a big problem on our street. Now I’m not so sure.

EDIT: We didn’t want to wait any longer to deal with it, so I dug the deepest hole I could under some back bushes and squashed every larva I could find, in and out of the carcass, then buried everything. I hope that’s the end of that. Yuuuuuuuck.

  • bearfootbees
    4·
    1 year ago

    Also on vi. I don’t think it’s an issue. Our weather is absolutely ideal for most bug/larval growth. Someone may correct me here, but larva typically only rest dead flesh in our area. The buzzfeed stories that you hear, are excessively rare, if even close to true.

    Don’t worry so much about it, cats are pretty resilient, and are used to eating raw rodents and stuff.

    How this helps! Nice to meet another Islander on this big ol’Lemmy!

    • ArghblargOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      Hellow fellow islander!

      Yeah we aren’t so concerned that she found a rat, we know they show up from time to time (rare here, again due to all the cats I think). It was the botfly larvae that really got us worried. From what we’ve read may grow on/in live animals – horses can apparently even get them. But that’s according to the internet, not a vet :)