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Our cat found a dead rat. ... 'things' emerged from it. Should we be concerned?

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Arghblarg@lemmy.ca
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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.

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Arghblarg@lemmy.caOP
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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 :)

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Fogle@lemmy.ca
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And another!

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