If you have dogs and a house with a back yard where they might do their business, it is important to think about where you live. If you live near a forest or other wild or wilder place where you see raccoons, skunks, deer etc. and wild birds of all sorts very likely you also have wood rats or other species of mice and other things that size.
Where I live wood rats live in the forests but if you have dogs (1 dog or more) and you let them do their business in your back yard, just remember if you don't walk around cleaning up from them doing this often enough that rats can live on dog feces almost completely. All they need is enough water to drink. So, during the winter months they might want to come live under your house or in your walls or near your forced air heater ducts or even inside those ducts if they can get away with it. Then they go outside and feed on your dogs business that they have left in the back yard.
This is an important thing to think about if you are a home owner or if you are a renter of a home with a fenced in back yard especially, because a wood rat (at least in California) is perfectly capable of chewing through almost anything wood and even through the blocks of cement tile that are the basis of most pier block building done in California where we don't usually have basements. So, they are perfectly capable of chewing through wood or those pier blocks to get under your house and into your heating ducts, especially if they aren't the all metal expensive kind and are instead the wire hoops with plastic or mylar sheeting instead. They don't want to come inside your house where you live because your dog or cat might eat them or you might kill them and their babies. However, they are perfectly willing to live under your house or in your attic or inside your walls if you let them.
Just remember wood rats and other creatures are survivors too. They have lived thousands to millions of years without us and now sometimes if we aren't very careful they try to move in with us under our homes and into our walls and sometimes into our attics. So, don't let them do this.
Rats are very pernicious and hard to get rid of multigenerationally. So, I have used rat pellet poison if I have had this problem in the past. The problem is I have had 2 dogs since the early 2000s at this house and there are dogs across the back fence and then there are multiple dogs the other side of the south fence as well in our back yard. Even though the dogs and one of mine loves to eat things like rats and gophers they can be hard to catch. Also, if you poison your rats put the pellets where the rats are and where the dogs (or your cats) cannot get to so they don't die too.
The main advantage I know of to using poison rat pellets is rats die usually under the house and this often scares away other rats in the future from moving in there too for 1 to 2 years. Though you could go find the carcass but then it wouldn't scare away more rats because of the dead rat there. So, it is up to you what you decide to do. But, it is important to know when you live in a fairly wild area where deer and bucks and raccoons walk up and down your front driveway and up and down the street every day, you are going to have literally anything wild that lives in the forest. In fact, one of our neighbors woke up to watch a mountain lion walk across her front yard while hunting for food about 7:30am one morning recently and about 10 years ago I came across a mountain lion kill while walking in the nearby forests of a rear leg partially eaten of a deer by a mountain lion as well. So, the wilder it is around where you live the more you need to prepare to deal with critters. In fact, recently a really beautiful skunk I saw walking through our back yard. My daughter's corgi dog wanted at it real bad but I didn't want to have to take my daughter's dog to a vet so she wouldn't go blind or have lung failure before she died either from skunk scent.
I personally think that porcupines and skunks are two of the most dangerous things for dogs in a forest because either can kill a dog in one night if humans aren't around to save the dog. 2nd to this would be raccoons which love to hunt dogs in packs, especially little ones at night. All three of these creatures are out at night so be sure to bring your dogs inside to keep them seeing and alive.
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