Pleeeeeeeease help. My Mom has a problem with mice, they keep moving in. We set traps in the places we can, but they are in the attic now. I can hear them. Yech. How they get in there, I don’t know.
I know there are poisons and such to put up there and then they eat them and die, but I’d really rather avoid an attic full of dead, rotting mice. Our attic is not one built for walking in or storing things, there is basically space to crawl around in some areas and that’s it, so it isn’t like we could go up there and take them out.
Is there any other way? We do have pets in the house, including guinea pigs. Maybe there are some other products to try?
I seem to recall that the poisons you get nowadays rot the mice from the inside out (or something) but anyway, the net result is that you don’t get dead rotting mice. The poison just eats them away so practically nothing remains.
In terms of sheer dedication to the cause, cats are without equal. I once lived in a house that had a cat when some mice moved in. The cat just sat motionless for three days and nights staring at the hole which the mice were coming out of. It didn’t move a muscle until a mouse popped it’s head out and then BAM! One dead mouse. By the end of the three days it had caught 15. It knew it had caught them all because it couldn’t smell any more so then it just went back to normal. The perfect killing machine - you couldn’t pay someone to show that kind of dedication.
Only problem is the cat might just kill them without eating them and then you do end up with dead rotting mice. So poison’s probably better. If you don’t want to kill the mice then you can get live traps. I’ve used these before and they seem to work pretty well but traps are a slow business - if you’re lucky you might get one a night.
Most likely your cat won’t eat the mice – fat, well-fed house cats used to canned/dry food, seem to have lost the instinct that that furry bundle is food, although they still very much enjoy playing with those neat-o toys until they break.
OTOH, this doesn’t have to lead to rotting mice. If your cat is at all like ours, he will proudly announce each kill and parade around with the corpse. It will be brought directly to you (best result – praise puss extravangently and then dispose of corpse), left in some prominent place as an offering to you (it’s beloved master, who seems unable to hunt for himself) such as on your pillow (ick), beside your shoes (not too bad), IN your shoe (triple ick, after you’ve shoved your foot in and found it), or rather cute in an ickly way, laid neatly beside the cat’s own food dishes.
If you’re in a suburban or rural area, just toss the bodies outside somewhere – some scavenger will take it away within an hour or two. In the city, I guess flushing it is the best. Either way, no rotting bodies to smell.
Some cats, when they have multiple kills, prefer to line them up neatly in rows. My daughter works in a bookshop that has two shop cats. One of them is a dedicated cricket-killer (the other one cannot be bothered to move himself) and the employees frequently find a line of dead crickets waiting for them in the morning.
And an amusing little animation from my bookmark file.
If you called an exterminator, they would probably use poison, and I’d go ahead and set out DCon, or something like that.
DCon and similar rodent baits used to use warfarin - the current formulation is a different compound which has a similar action. Namely, it’s an anticoagulant. The rat or mouse hemorrhages to death. One of the reasons for using this type of poison is that it makes the rat or mouse thirsty when it starts having massive internal bleeding, and it will go looking for water, dying outside rather than in your walls.
Cats work best, hands down–but as noted, the cat has to be able to get at most of the mices’ range to scare them off. The problem now with a lot of poisons (at least in the US) is that the stronger ingredients are no longer used (arsenic is one, I don’t know if it’s illegal in the US but many of the insect and pest poisons that had it 10+ years ago now don’t). A mouse can squeeze through any hole that their head will fit through, and that’s a pretty small hole.
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Sounds like you need WMD: Weapons of Mouse Destruction. You might have a hard time finding these, even the CIA can’t seem to find them.
More seriously, glue traps and PB. They won’t harm the kids, skunks, etc. Cats work well, but if you don’t like cats (who, me?) it probably isn’t the best solution.
When my floor was invaded by mice in college, they gave us glue traps and they weren’t very effective; lots of times I found evidence that a mouse had been in the trap, but no dead mouse. Spring traps seemed to be more lethal, but even then the mouse problem continued for some time. Mice come indoors in fall, and there seemed to be little that could be done to stop them until the weather changed.
The next time I experienced a mouse situation (in the kitchen and the adjacent bathroom of an old house), I used about 5 old-style spring traps and some plastic traps. The plastic traps – ostensibly advanced pre-baited things shaped like a bear trap – never worked, even when I added peanut butter. They were triggered a few times, but they never killed a mouse. The spring traps were much better, but you have to follow the directions carefully. Put the trap perpendicular to a wall where mice run, with the bait-lever side facing the wall. Mice run along the same paths – always close to a wall – over and over. Some suggest leaving the traps baited but unarmed for a few days so the mice will get used to the new source of food. If you don’t set up the traps properly – and sometimes, even if you do – they will trigger without killing the mouse, and you’ll find them upside-down and sometimes bloody. Sometimes a mouse will be injured but not killed, which is really the worst-case scenario.
Do you remember the name of the poison that rots them from the inside out? Yech, I can’t believe I’m asking that. I am one of those dedicated ‘bekindtoanimalsalwaysalways’ people, and this is not fun. I hate mice though. Big time. If they didn’t use the bathroom absolutely everywhere it wouldn’t be so bad.
We do have cats, but the attic is not a fit place for them. Insulation, wires, who knows what else is up there. They catch those that venture down from the attic. But some of our cats were orphaned at an early age, and I’ve found after 25 years of having cats as pets that if they didn’t have a Momma cat to train them, they are going to be pretty clueless in the mouse catching department.
Or, they will know to catch the mouse, but they don’t know that ‘killing bite’ and just run around with it endlessly, yowling questions about what to do with the squirming thing. One of my boys, an orphan at a very early age, is like this. He will catch it, and as long as it does not move, everything is okay. But as soon as it squirms, he starts growling at it while it is in his mouth, and then he drops it and hisses at it. He emotionally destroys the mouse, but physically… well, it’s usually just injured. It’s not his fault though, he was bottle-raised by the very nice humans at the ARK. Here he is… Awww… http://www.arkinc.org/arkbaby.jpg Sorry, minor hijack there.
I won’t use the spring traps unless I can fasten them to something. Once we put one in a completely solid closed-up outdoor storage room, free of any animals but mice. Or so we thought. The next day, the trap was missing. Missing. We never found it.
I want to get something in the attic soon so at least if they rot it will be cold and maybe not SO bad, as opposed to summertime when the heat will have us all leaving home if one dies.
The best idea is to get a cat. In our case, we have had cats that stayed outside and have learned to suppliment their diet with whatever they can find. However, we have not had a cat in about four years, since we travel so much. We have had trouble with mice, until this year, when skunks moved in under the house. We haven’t had a mouse yet this year. I don’t think I’d recommend this solution to mice though.
There is no “bait” that rots a mouse from the inside out.
The only “bait” on the market today is Bromadiolone, an anticoagulant material.
This will NOT cause the mice to get thirsty and seek water outside. In fact the mouse will know it is sick and usually return to its nest to die. It will then rot and stink for a few weeks.
I have seen poisened mice appear in kitchens, leaving green tinged droppings all over, a sure sign that they ate the Bromadiolone. The mouse will move very slowly and seem drugged.
Glue Traps, never use these modern tourture devices. Mice will rip their own legs off trying to escape these things. If they cannot escape, they will take 1-2 weeks to die from lack of water and exposure.
Snap traps, are the most humane way off “killing”.
Get some barn kittens. Literally, kittens that were born in a barn and are half-way grown. Not only will they teach your other cats how to hunt, they may be small enough to comfortably maneuver around in the attic.
If you don’t want to get another cat permanently, if you have some friends that live out in the country that have barn cats, ask to borrow one. Same affect as above.
I happen to live in a rural area, and we get mice every year when the weather starts getting cold. The only way that I’ve found to get rid of them is to use those old fashioned spring traps with a bit of peanut butter spread on them as bait. Poisons, glue traps, and all the other things listed in this thread have never been all that effective for me. Unfortunately you have to get rid of the sprung traps every day, and there’s no way to do that other than to crawl around in your attic.
I watched a show about the making of Stuart Little. The “mouse trainer” got their best info on how to train a mouse from exterminators. Kinda funny for a movie where a mouse is the main character, but exterminators know their habits better than just about anyone. One of the things they mentioned is that mice make trails of sorts. Once they get a path through your house, they will stick to that path. You can take advantage of this by sticking traps wherever you’ve seen mice or where you find mouse droppings.
