I’ve had a couple of horrible mouse infestations in the last few years. Like you I dislike glue traps or poison, for the reasons already mentioned.
The cat and the terrier mix take care of most intruders but the electronic mouse killers are the bomb for fast, clean and very efficient kills. Insert batteries and bait the trap. Mouse smells food and goes for it, its last happy thought is “oh boy, food!” Crosses the electrified plate, immediately dead. Light flashes on the trap; you don’t even have to look at the remains…flip it over the trash can, dump mouse body, press button to reset trap.
It helps to not think of mice as some of God’s cute little creatures, but as vermin. They are incontinent and fast-breeding animals, drop urine and shit constantly, and breed every 6 weeks or so. The reason they breed so prolifically is that Mother Nature designed them as feed for predators and we humans are higher on the food chain.
Look for a trap like this at Ace or True Value. They are re-usable and very easy to set and empty. We caught 22 mice with them after our previous cat died. Then we got another cat. First evidence of mice, the kitty food is getting locked up.
Look, you have to block up all those little cracks and crevice just to be green, but that won’t solve the problem, and cats - or any predator - can only keep a population in check, they can’t eradicate them. So your options are traps and poison, and poison is just horrible.
Should we find some links on mice as disease spreading vermin for you, to make this easier for you?
Or maybe you can get married and declare Emptying the Mouse Trap the spouse’s job (because I have to admit, I hate it too.)
Way over thinking. I knew it wasn’t J. Alfred Prufrock.
But you could have killed ten mice while you were writing it.
EDIT: On the other hand, corn snakes are very pretty. I think you should go with a couple of those.
i’ve lived in the country 20 years, 10 in a hovel and now 10 in a house i bought new, and have never had a mouse problem. i keep 3 indoor/outdoor cats (turnover is 3 in 20 years of natural causes) who run the household and they love them some rodent, house mouse, field mouse, cotton rat. they get absolutely no people food so mouse is a treat, they eat everything except some ugly grey organ they leave behind with a brutal splash of blood i’m always having to bleach off the porch. no traps, no poison, no meece.
You will change your mind. When you finally see where those mice are living and the little poops all over, you will realize that they pose a serious health risk. Until then, your house will be infested. I’ll bet it’s a lot worse than you think. There is no nice way to control it. Welcome to country living.
And they are urinating every inch of the way.
When you relocate the live trapped mice their trails into your home are there for them and any other visiting mice.
I have a hunting shack in the deep forest and if I don’t keep on top of them they will overrun me!
I do use the poison because I have to control the outside population before I can get control of the inside population so all the out buildings, Outhouse, Sauna, Storage shed get the poison and the mouse traps get used inside the cabin.
I have used the pail and I also use a can but I use Etheline Glycol at times but its dangerous to everything else but it works well when I am away for a month or more as it preserves the corpses.
The poison is better all around as long as its used out of doors and in mousey places.
As posted, mice are vermin.
So, these mouses have to go. While I don’t quite hate them to pieces, I get that they’re more of a menace than a nuisance.
It sounds like the big question has been answered—with enough work I can manage to keep them mostly, but not completely at bay. It’ll be down to “oh, I think I hear a mouse, we’d better get the traps” instead of “what’s that sound? No, everybody, no need to look what’s goin’ on; it’s just our household mouse population.”
A major thing that’s keeping us on the no-kill-um route is how we’ve treated them for the past several years. “Rescuing” them from the cats was a major feat involving a lot of balance and creativity. Carrying them across the driveway I had the [Mel Gibson]FREEDOM[/MG] area. Letting them out of the box I’d half apologize for their treatment, give them advice to go out in the world (e.g. watch out for hawks and cats named Tom), extract a promise never to return, and wish them well on their journey. If we didn’t get to them in time I put them down in a different spot (no need to freak out the survivors), said a few words to the FSM, and respectfully backed away.
While primarily tongue and cheek (it’s not like we’re PETA members or vegans), doing it over and over again took its toll and I just can’t call in a hit on them. As admitted above, we’re fine with this area of our hypocrisy. You know what else fits in with that? We bought a large freezer chest to fill with locally grown meat (hey, isn’t that what country folk do?). It’s still largely empty. Why? Because it turns out that cows and chickens come from farms, not supermarkets—going to a local farm to pick up local meat means meeting the meat. We’d be just as freaked out as Mr. Dent and then end up as vegetarians.
So… looking on Amazon there are all sorts of live mouse traps. Any opinions on the differences between them? I know it would be easier and in most views better to buy Kill-o-Matic 1000s, but for now we’re trying the non-lethal route.
Also, once we do catch them, just how far from the house do we need to carry them? 100’? 200’? All the way to my neighbour’s yard?
it doesn’t matter if you relocate the mice or not, though if you placed the mouse 100 feet away then you might get that individual mouse back (in winter you can find trails in the snow that go that distance).
mice are constantly looking for nesting sites, food and places to put food caches. it is ongoing, it never stops, there are always new mice to carry on. new mice are born and they expand to their carrying capacity in any environment.
When we were living in our barn [roomies had the 2 bedrooms in the house, so we just put a lovely studio on the top floor of our barn] the boa escaped at the end of spring, and sort of free ranged the barn. That was the most rodent free it has been in the 20 years we have lived here. Unfortunately it went outside and froze in the late fall We never managed to recatch the poor thing
Yep, they’re laughing at you AND bringing their buddies back to the house with them.
Eradicating rodents in a circumstance like yours is pretty damn hard. However, you still need to try, if only to keep the population down. Having a good mouser cat is a plus. Small terrier dogs also help, but may not be compatible with your cats.
There are live traps you can purchase, but when you release the little vermin you have to do it a LOT farther away from the house than you have been.
So, Rhythmdvl, haven’t you noticed all those itsy bitsy posters tacked on trees and bushes about an inch from the ground that say, “PARTY! PARTY! PARTY!”?
The vermin are LAUGHING at you as they gleefully dance in your toaster, pee on your silverware, and give birth to millions in your boxer shorts drawer.
Again, I ask you: Do you swat flies? Do you squash mosquitoes? Maybe you only kill God’s creatures who have more than four feet?
The ONLY foodstuffs in your house that are safe from the marauding mice are the ones in your freezer.
~VOW
The mythology ‘round here is that it’s not posters it’s hobo code, though it’s primarily used by homeless pets. And chipmunks. We once left the exterior garage door cracked a bit after finding one of them was getting into the birdseed. That was borne just a bit on not wanting to trap him in there (though come to think of it it would have had the same effect). Ach, we’re suckers.
I make no claim to there being rational reasons for not wanting to sweep the mice off this mortal pantry. All emotion. Just as we have no problem putting nice, juicy 1” thick porterhouses on the grill but won’t go to face down the original cow.
Another thing is they’ve never really crossed us. I understand that it’s a fragile truce (pax romousa), but the only signs of them we’ve found so far are in the basement insulation (open ceilings), sounds of them scurrying in the walls, and the occasional sacrificial victim. Not that we’ve moved any heavy appliances out recently, but there’s no sign of them around foodstuffs. We keep that pretty neat and organized, and most of the storage is highly visible so we’d see signs of tampering or foul play. Or maybe these are neatfreak mice and they’ve been sweeping up after themselves. Again, this isn’t to say that they’re not crapping and peeing where they shouldn’t or that we’re not oblivious to some things we’d freak out about if we knew, just one more whisker on trying to discern why we’re reluctant to break the truce.
So, really, what is far enough? Some mouse that was born in our walls or came in on the north side gets dumped off 100’ away on the south side (after being carried in a box), how is he going to find his way back in? Is there a whole-house scent (not just his own, but of us, the materials, etc.) that he can easily detect and head towards? Some sort of magnetic fluctuation in the ether? What if I walk a bit, shake the box real hard, and then spin him around to get him really dizzy? Maybe make him a tiny piña colada to get him good and drunk, too.
I am not a zoologist, or even a nice mice-ologist, but I would imagine 100 feet is a walk in the park for a typical mouse. I see chipmunks and squirrels bounding 200 feet in a few seconds, even if they aren’t being pursued. I imagine 100 ft is just your mouse’s front porch.
If you doubt this, why not mark each one with paint, then see if you catch it again? It would be an interesting experiment. Of course, you won’t catch the smart ones who have learned to evade the trap…
I don’t know if I’m convinced that the same mice make it back to the house. I agree that 100ft is nothing for a mouse, but it has to know to go back there. I think that people that try to release mice simply aren’t keeping up with the breeding. Eventually they give up and go lethal, and suddenly their mouse problem starts to subside. They then draw the conclusion that the mice had simply been coming back to the house. In reality, live traps just suck.
Of course, they have to make their own decision about the mouse problem. If they have a stable population that they are OK with, then that’s fine. It might not be a stable population though. It might be increasing exponentially. I expect a tipping point will be reached, and they will laugh at the days when they tried live traps. I know I do.
From what I understand from previous infestations when I briefly entertained the notion that “humane” trapping was a fine idea (sorry no cites but I imagine I could dig some up):
Mice are very territorial - a “relocated” mouse is likely to die slowly of starvation or be killed by resident mouses.
Or it will make its way back unless relocated at least a mile away - where it may either die or be killed, or simply move into someone else’s house.
If conditions are friendly for mice, they’ll keep moving in.
Also, chances are the mouse you “humanely” trap and move is a nursing female since they are prolific breeders, so by being “humane” you sentence a nest of baby pinkies to death by slow starvation.
Really, a scorched earth policy is kindest for mice. Don’t give them false hope, don’t assume you’re being kind by “humanely” trapping and relocating, don’t aim for a “fragile truce” - be unequivocal and shoot for complete eradication! Let your loal mouse population abandon your residence, and re-establish a community somewhere truly mouse-friendly.
A black light is about $10 and it will highlight (if you dare) urine trails all over your house, if you have mice. Repeat after me: Mice are not cute, they are vermin and dirty.
We never managed to recatch the poor thing