Hello i am a new trapper i wanna get the most out of the muskrats i catch how would you go about making bait or lure from the musks

Do you use the meat at all or the organs the glands in the leg fat the casters how do you prepare it ?

I tired looking up stuff on youtube but didnt have much success i know alot of people wouldnt give up there recipes but im curious about making something simple

Thanks for everyones time

ive read books about guys that will take muskrat legs and other meat from the muskrat and use it in pocket sets and dirthole sets for mink and coyote

something real simple for predators is grind up some gutted rat carcasses. you can leave the livers in. add a couple of those sweet smelling male glands on the abdomen of male rats in the spring. then freeze it. thaw some out when you start trapping in the fall.

i ground some up last night im going to try it in my pocket sets next week

Spring glands and hind quarter ground up. Great for cats and canines a light taint is all you want

Red meat is red meat is red meat and the variance in consistent results is nothing to write home about. The spring glands and liver ground with the rear quarters that was mentioned is a great foundation of a potential winner though. I also agree with a slight taint, on the glands too.

By that reasoning raccoon meat should make every bit as good of a bait as bobcat or horse meat then, is that what you are saying?

If he is saying that I'd like to hear his testing process, the amount of testing he did and what all types of meats he used to come to that conclusion.

You conveniently left out the mention of the variance in consistent results part. That’s ok, I’m not biting. You do you, you’ll get no debate from me. I have no issue with letting people believe what they want to believe, and I certainly don’t feel like I am so superior that I need to make people think like I do. It is a comment made on the internet, take it with a grain of salt and don’t let it fire you up. Red muscle meat is 70-75% water. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for one kind to be vastly different than another. I also think rodent/mice aren’t as good of a bait as some would have you believe. Do predators consume them, of course. I think that at certain times of the year, the energy expended to hunt them down is far greater than the energy a tiny rodent would provide their biochemical system. But again, these are comments made on the internet by someone that you don’t know. How you handle or perceive them is on you, not me. Logic can be a heck of a mountain to climb for some. As far as testing goes...I would love to have a conversation with two guys that interpret the testing results the same exact way. There will always be deviations from the mean average. If you hang your hat on these deviations, you’ll end up adopting false hypothesis. Like I said, you do you. I’ll do me and take it all with a grain of salt.

I am not trying to put words anyone's mouth but I have never heard anyone be so flippant and say that any red meat makes a good enough base that it doesn't matter. I am just asking for clarification if that is whatwas meant.

FD, I am not baiting you, no pun intended. I have never heard anyone say all red meats were so close in performance as a bait it did not matter. Every bait pile I have made showed a different result. On top of that, very basically...even a 2 legged cretan like me can smell the difference in 2 different meats, and show a preference while choosing supper, thus my question.

To your point, yep, 2 guys on the net that don't know each other, bound to be discussion, I kinda thought that was why we all showed up here.

“I’m not baiting you.” That was funny, made me laugh in a positive way. I think the degree of taint plays a huge role and will make or break whatever meat you opt to use. There are so many variables to consider when testing that I found it to be easy to adopt deviations as the standard. Population, specie demographics, how a substance is tested, when a substance is tested, etc. can all influence your interpretations. In an effort to truly qualify your interpretations, I think one needs to go deeper into the weeds sort of speak beyond trail cams, since that is a common denominator of most testing efforts. Throughout this, one type did produce positive results more than others, and vice versa. But back to your pointed topic, I do think the ground hind quarters is better with including the glands. But then is it really the red meat or does the inclusion of the rat glands become the driver? A ton of variables to interpret for sure. That’s what makes this hobby so intriguing.

Thank you for the clarification, I fully agree how many variables there truly are and how bottomless this rabbit hole is. When you mention testing beyond cameras, I am at a loss to come up with any means beyond that. A test site with digging evidence and videos of the sniff reactions seem to reliably indicate the perfornance we seek with a trap set and the attractant in place. Just curious if you had something else in mind?

Lot of words that don't say really anything.
FD u remember years ago when u posted on here if anyone would send u lures or baits u would test them during season?
Well if u don't ill refresh ur memory. I sent you bait and lures on my dime. You pmed after season saying you didn't use them and that was years ago. When I invest my time and money then someone doesn't do what they say they will do that pretty much tells me what I need to know.

For me, I kind of broke down just what it is that we are attempting to do. The quick answer is that I’m attempting to entice a specie by playing off of their biochemical system that has evolved over their existence. Instead of trying to target a few select individuals, it seemed more logical to approach it how I described. It was also logical to me to assume that any physical actions or reactions seen with our eyes today had some presumptive value in specie survival. Similar to a virgin dog having an aggressive interest in breeding a female. Why would he be dialed into that so eagerly when he has never bred before? The short answer is because it guarantees specie survival. It is a biochemical drive that has evolved that originates from a seemingly subconscious level. I learned a lot about the wild canine but that was only part of it. The other part was to learn more about the ingredients and substances we use to attract them. To save this from being a longer post than it already is, learning about the substances and trying to identify which substances are more likely to be effective in enticing their system and why, was and continues to be, the greatest challenge for me. I feel much more comfortable traversing this hobby from a foundation that is logical that I can grow as my knowledge also grows. For me, it has become more than a quest for successful formulas or ingredients. I have to know why. Sorry for being a nerd about it but that is how my approach and pursuit has evolved. I just roll with it

I can appreciate that, but the question of how to get beyond dug out dirt holes and videos of K9's sniffing and searching relentlessly at a lure you placed remains. I cannot communicate with a dog and only sometimes understand the bark of my beagle, so short of a K9 translator and a test subject willing to submit to an interview, video and dug out holes of bait are all we can really go by other than furs hung on the barn for a photo. Just my ramblings.

Thanks for the dialogue. I enjoyed it. Conversations like this always provide me an opportunity to see things from a different perspective and I try to learn. The worst thing that can happen in this hobby is that we become stagnant with our pursuit of knowledge.

Dead horse dead deer sure get ate faster than dead beef most of the time. Carcass piles of coyotes get multiple bald eagles but not much else. O'Gorman wrote coyotes like to visit dead relatives and sets made on likely travel routes are good. Not been my experience. Not as many on a dead horse or deer say. Not even close. Beavers are good. Everything shows up to eat a beaver pile. Coons, a few birds same with skunks and possums. Most baits are spiced up with other stuff. Straight bobcat carcass seems to attract mostly birds but spiced up seems to be a trapper preferred bait. Even for cats though I think bobcats are not cannibals'. Have had lions kill a trapped bobcat a couple times and both times some was ate. Had a coyote ate one time. May have been other coyotes (Wayne Derrick thought so and it very well could be) I suspect it was a lion. Collared lion wandered into west KS some years ago and one of the biologists that was monitoring it said it ate a lot of coyotes.

Predators most undeniably have preferred prey species. Availability and health of the predator also come into play. Have not had a big rabbit population here in awhile but bobcats seem to do fine killing packrats.

I know I am rambling but not all meat bases IMO are equal value to a trapper.

My observations are similar to Dannys. Beaver gets the most attention from most all predators and birds of prey, ravens,eagles and crows. When I trapped hard for beavers in Arkansas I placed many carcases in different locations. Within a week give or take most had been picked over pretty hard. Coon and other incidental carcasses laid without much interest. Beaver meat alone is good, spice it up it is hard to beat. Cat meat is "so so" as a stand alone fresh meat bait. Aged and doctored makes the difference.

Deer get hit pretty quick here. Beef carcasses may sit a long time or never get hit by predators. Never worked any dead horse areas that I can say. I have seen some old carcasses that still showed some interest by seeing marking and droppings and lots of tracks in the snow in the West.

The only way I could see all red meat being nearly equal is from a survival perspective? If you starve a coyote half to death you could get him to “live” off nearly any red meat. But the predators have shown me they have preferences.
Wish I had some muskrats in my area to use as bait

I once killed a bobcat that had a Very full belly. So I cut it open to see what it had been eating. It had eaten another bobcat! Including at least part of the head, it had swallowed the mask (face skin) whole and it was still intact in its belly. I seen where a lion killed a coyote a couple years ago, the lion had kittens and I'm not sure if the coyote was after the kittens or just trying to horn in on the kill, but the female ran it down and killed it, but didn't eat any of it.

I always cut open the stomachs of predators to examine the contents. It reveals the facts of their most recent meals and also shows some remains of other prey species that haven't completely digested as of yet such as small bones, hair and skulls from small rodents/packrats.

Pack rats, cottontails and small bird and turkey feathers I have found within the same bobcat stomach contents at times in Kansas.

One interesting fact I learned by doing stomach content analysis is how many had a very full to a gorged stomach. Leading me to the conclusion that most of these predators weren't caught due to being hungry.

I wonder what the reasoning was for this intrepretation.? Opportunity, Greed, Curiosity, all the above ?

Another observation is how large of a mass of meat/hair sticks, small stones and pine needles were found within those swallowed masses of meat.

I have found many bobcats/coyotes stomachs had some extremely large sections of flesh/hair/sticks, stones etc.. Some the size of a soft ball still intact and some 8 -10" long sections of tissue/hair/bone and what ever was stuck to the meat that was native "ground cover material" to the kill site.

This info gave me specfic areas that these predators were hunting and some of their preferred areas to score a kill.

Flesh, hair and bone just bit, ripped and torn from the prey animal and swallowed down very quickly it seems. Not much chewing indicated of the food at all. Just seems they killed the animal, tore it apart as quickly as they could and down the hatch it went.

That would suggest to me their fear or concern that another predator may come along and attempt to steal its kill. So it needed to eat as quickly as possible at least in my evaluation. Maybe others would have another theory.

Larger predators like lions many times prefer to drag their prey off to a more somewhat secluded area for feeding on its kill.

NM not KS

I have never opened an empty K9 stomach either, I doubt they ever go hungry here. I would bet mange kills way more than starvation.

IMO that hurry up before something else comes along is why coyotes in KS are braver than states with lower numbers. Some of course are spooky but going after numbers it does not make sense to take all the care it does in high pressure states with gmen on every corner.

RegularJoe, they dont get dental care. Starvation is rarely a problem. Arthritis, and bad teeth are the number one cause of natural death IMO. In winter arthritis can starve one and tooth infection is often fatal if the tooth wont come out. have caught quite a few with hardly any teeth left but they survive.


This poor devil stayed alive by burrowing into the hay in a stackyard and eating silage. It was frozen when I found it on a daily check.

No dental care? Lol. That is a sad looking dog for sure. Arthritus without a good wood stove to cuddle would kill anybody.

I dont cut open many bellies, but occasionally I find a big tom cat who is especially round and curiosity gets the best of me. I always assumed the sticks, pine straw, grass, and dirt I found in the bellies was done when they were in the trap. It never occured to me that it could/would be from their last meal. Thanks for posting that insight and getting my gears turning