I do not share the common visceral hatred of uninvited animals trying to share my living quarters, but I do try to exclude them, or failing that, kill them as humanely as possible (no glue traps, those are right up there with leg traps for fur-bearers). I don’t think of them as evil and hence deserving of extermination. To me, the difference between wanting to exterminate certain animals and thinking that way about groups of people is simply a matter of scale, the emotion is the same one.
I’m not sentimental either; I’m not going to be building mice little houses or knitting them hats. I merely feel that humans and other animals are not separate categories of existence. We live here and so do they, and I protect my nest the way they protect theirs, out of practicality.
Dumping mice outside, even quite a distance away, just slightly delays them running right back to your house. They are as good at getting back to their base as homing pigeons, within the limits of their little legs. This has been verified by wildlife biologists. Mice have returned within a day or so at distances as great as several miles.
We live far enough out from any neighbors that all the animals we deal with are native. No Norway rats etc. We get woodchucks, native mice, chipmunks, skunks. In winter we always hear mice in our walls. It’s a very very old house and there’s no easy way to get them out. I keep my dry foods in glass jars with tight lids. I set spring traps in places the dogs can’t get to.
I don’t keep cats, entirely because their predation effects are so destructive to birds and reptiles, which are both facing enormous losses due to human degradation of their world. Not keeping cats is one of my tiny useless gestures against human beings’ ecocide juggernaut. But I do trap mice. I give them to my chickens.