Since when? I’ve sealed several cracks with expanding foam and it’s worked quite well at keeping mice and squirrels out of the house.
We’ve got 100’s here in the woods. Been killing them daily in traps. They keep making a home in the car air filters!
NO!! Do NOT use poison as you will then poison your cats! Cat’s are weird - what one cat will never touch another cat will devour. Also, there will be undigested residue in the mouse’s gut, not to mention long term issues. Musicat is correct.
Do use some thin sheet metal under sinks and stuff, slows them down from getting in. Expanding foam doesn’t work as well but it’s easy to use.
Be careful about food.
Use some live traps, but then you must remove the mice quite some distance.
All of this will slow them down a lot from infestation to occasional cat-toy visitor.
I think it depends on how determined they are. If they have a nest that you have sealed up with foam, it takes them all of a few seconds to tear it out. But if they don’t know what’s behind it, they probably won’t bother.
So don’t store your nuts behind the foam.
The sealing off as much as possible/live trapping sounds great.
Of course, finding a live trap that will hold a mouse and simultaneously protect it from the cats is another story.
What kind of distance are we talking about? The driveway is about 400’ long. Far enough? If it’s cold and snowy, can I build a trebuchet with enough umph to hurl them the appropriate distance but not squoosh them in g-forces?
As for sealing, how high am I looking? Base of the foundation is solid. Between the foundation and the wall? Do I have to climb up on my roof? (:eek:) What to do about the garage door? Allow them in the garage (lots of gaps in the door but it moves so sealing that isn’t possible) but ensure the walls are sound? Is this the type of service an exterminator is likely to provide or a general contractor (paying for competence trumps the inclination towards independence and machismo)?
ETA: Wait … if I seal up all the holes, won’t I be sealing the mice in with me? Is that were the combination of cats and live traps comes in? No impact on our food yet, but I imagine that would happen if they can’t get out to their little mouse farms.
Our house is so old that we figure the mouse corpses are the only insulation we have left.
I can see where that would work, but how do you get it into the mouse?
Get more cats. I lived in a mouse-friendly old farm house for a long time, tried every form of traps and poison, just barely fought the rodents to a draw. Then one day a cute stray female cat followed my boy home. He kindly built her a bed in the barn and then the cat had kittens. Then the kittens had kittens. Before long we had a fluctuating population of barn cats occupying the out-of-doors and we had no more mice - either in the house or outbuildings.
The thing is, these were not pampered house pets, they were working livestock…outdoor cats, some friendly, some semi-feral. I gave them a bare subsistance wage - a couple of cups of cheap dry cat food once a day for the whole lot. Enough to keep them around, not starving, but if they wanted any extra goodies they had to go out and work for them. Sort of a minimalist feline welfare state. But they did an excellent job of keeping the mice, gophers, garter snakes, blue racers etc. at bay for at least a 400 foot perimeter around the farmstead. No carcases to deal with, the cats consumed what they caught. These days, maybe one mouse a year makes it into the house and I generally deal with them with glue traps.
SS
I know all about the Hanta virus in the Four Corners area. People who have been living here all their lives give a shoulder shrug to Hanta, but I’m aware and concerned.
If you seal up all the tiny openings (and tear down all the party invitations posted around your property), the traps and cats should eventually clear out what you’ve got inside.
You’re gonna have to go through ALL the cabinets and clear out the little mice poopies. Trust me, they are everywhere. Even under the bathroom sinks! The little snots love to eat handcrafted soap. Look for the chew marks on ALL cardboard, and check ALL plastic bags. We had to empty out ALL dresser drawers and disinfect everything. I even made Hubster get rid of a brand new toaster, because GUESS WHAT IS IN THE BOTTOM OF A TOASTER? Crumbs, which are mouse caviar.
All big appliances have to be pulled away from the walls. It’s WARM back there, and mousies like to be warm. You’ll be dumbfounded by all the tell-tale mouse poopies.
After you SEE how the little shits have occupied every square inch of your home and CRAPPED in it, I don’t think you’ll be so kind-hearted. Get rid of the poopies, and disinfect the surfaces where they sat. Mice are incontinent, which means that wherever they go, they go.
VERMIN!
~VOW
Hmm… fill all exterior walls with expanding foam insulation. They might tear out a few inches of foam, but if the entire house is blocked, they are going to be quite busy.
Yes, block off all entrace ways - as others mentioned, any hole is an entrance. I worked in an office once that was beside a large wilderness area. I saw field mice squeezing under doors where the gap could not be 1/8 inch. Seal ALL gaps. Be sure doors fit tight - very tight. I like the idea of blocking around openings with steel wool; then foam before, caulk the oustside of the steel wool after, so it cannot be easily pulled out.
Do you have concrete floor/basement/foundations, or is it a building with crawlspace on wood supports? If the latter - hah, good luck!!
If you don’t want to poison, then traps and sticky-paper traps are about all you can do.
Not far from the truth.
From what I understand, rats (and I assume mice) leave slimy, greasy, uriney trails everywhere they go. If another rat comes accross a trail, they assume it is a safe path, and leads to or from food.
A couple of things I’ve tried that seem to have worked.
The ultrasound generators. I know the scientific tests have supposedly shown they don’t work. But anecdotely, I’ve used them and I never saw any more mice.
Peppermint oil. Sprinkle a few drops all over your house. Your house will strongly smell of peppermint but you can live with that. Mice apparently cannot. Their sense of smell is more sensitive than a human’s and the peppermint smell will drive them out of the house. And once again, it appears to have worked.
That said, I don’t have cats or other pets. So these methods might affect your pets.
Maybe instead of drowning them with the 5 gallon bucket trap you could cut the bottom out of a second bucket and make a well-sealed two-story bucket.
With careful placement you could probably keep the cats out of a double-decker bucket trap and just relocate your mice.
We live in the woods and we’ve managed to seal the house against mice. I’d recommend sealing up as best you can and then going on a killing spree using many methods - KILL THEM ALL. You won’t enjoy it but you should only have to do it once and for the sake of your health and sanity it seems reasonable to do it even if it feels mean.
Good luck, vermin troubles are miserable.
You are delusional if you think you can live trap the mice. If you see the mice and the droppings you probably have 30 or more mice. We just finished ridding our garage of mice. They got into some grass seed I had for the lawn. I tried some live traps an caught nothing for a couple of days. I got some glue traps and caught 3 in two minutes and over the course of a week caught about 30 more.
The other thing about trying to mouse-proof your house - I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate how small a hole they can get through. According to this video, they can into a 1/4 inch hole. Seriously.
We have a house in the middle of 15 acres. When we first moved in we had a mouse problem. I then procured some cats, and kept them outside (i.e. outdoor-only cats). They kill the mice before they get into the house. We no longer have mice in the house.
Mice should be killed. They are a nuisance, very destructive, and a health hazard.
I live in a log cabin, so it was absolutely impossible to plug all the gaps, which is one of the first bits of advice you get. Also, we couldn’t risk poison due to pets. When our area had a mini mouse plague, things got pretty bad.
What I did:
- Huge clean up. Disinfect every nook and cranny, every surface, etc. Make sure all food is sealed up. This included throwing out the toaster, as someone else mentioned.
- Regularly (twice daily) wiped surfaces down with a homemade repellant (I just googled recipes - I think the one I used was made from rubbing alcohol and boiled mint)
The above steps seemed to keep them out of the normal living areas pretty well, but they were still in the roof. No evidence of them out and around (i.e, no poo reappearing in the living areas), but we could hear them in the roof at night. The last step fixed the problem…
- Get a non-venomous snake in your roof. He cleared up the mouse problem nicely
We noticed a gorgeous diamond python heading up into the roof one day… No more mice!
We have a wooded house on five acres as well. We started out with a major infestation. Our cats were not mousers. They learned. Our cats are awesome mousers now.
That and poison. I hide the poison in crevices the cats can’t get at. I use multiple types of poison too. I noticed that after a while, the mice were just eating the cheap green stuff you get at the grocery store. Apparently, they can develop a tolerance. Go to the local farm supply store. Theoretically, the mice go outside to find water after they eat it. Well, that’s what I was told, and I’ve never smelled anything to the contrary.
I’d heard that barn owls are superior to cats for de-mousing a barn. I don’t know how you’re going to encourage them to stick around your house, maybe some sort of properly sized nesting box. The SDMB used to have a Barn sub-forum, I wonder where it went to. And if the regulars have insights.
You are way over thinking this.
Would it help to look at it as improving the gene pool?
This should be the best time of year for poison, as it is very dry and they shouldn’t be around in the spring to get aromatic.
When using traps, remember that mice typically aren’t very adventurous; put the traps where you see the most evidence.
And feed the cats a little less, then maybe they’ll finish what they start.