Yesterday morning, the Little Dog was acting very suspiciously - running over to the curtains and searching around the room. My wife and I were working on painting the kitchen, and when she made some noise by the sink, a mouse ran out and went under another cabinet. She immediately said “That’s it! We’re leaving!” I managed to calm her down, but I don’t think she slept well last night. I put a bunch of no-kill traps around, and then spent much of the morning under the house, filling the myriad holes from all the wires and plumbing. I discovered a couple of holes that a cat could get through, never mind a mouse.
This afternoon I checked one of the traps, and there was a tiny mouse in it. I drove him over the bridge, and let him go on the other side of the river. I hope that’s far enough away…
You’ve done now. He’ll go tell his extended family: “Hey, that dude in that house fed me, gave me a safe place to sleep, even tho’ there was this h-u-g-e doggy. Then he gave me a free ride to visit y’all, hey let’s all go visit him now!”
I’ve seen a few mice in or around my house over the past 40 years or so, and my first thought is always, “Aww, how cute!” Which is immediately followed by, “Aaagh! Vermin!”
We have two cats, one young with an impressive complement of teeth, and the other in late middle age with only her eight incisors. Guess which one caught a mouse a few weeks ago? It escaped into the back yard when we made her let it go, no doubt to return to its many children in the garage.
Living in a rather rural tropical environment as I do, rodents (more likely rats than mice) are a fact of life, though with cats in the house we never have any indoors except for the very occasional dead one brought in by a proud feline hunter.
On one side of our property, we have a deep gulch, filled with a jungle of trees and vines, leading down to a stream about 30 feet below. For a long time we threw compostable materials down there - out of sight, out of mind, and we never tossed anything that wouldn’t go into a compost pile.
Then, a few weeks ago, we bought a composter. Now our compost goes there, instead of down the gulch. So the other day one of the cats was all pounce-crouched and tail-twitchy, focused on a torch ginger with a stem about 4-5 feet high at the edge of our lawn. Turns out there was a rat precariously perched on top, eating part of the flower. It was pretty funny, given that even cat acrobatics would be unlikely to be up to the task of nabbing the rat atop the flower spike.
My guess is that we were unknowingly feeding a rat pack with our compostables, and now that the food supply has vanished, hungry rats at the bottom of the ravine are being forced afield to find sustenance. We’ve seen 2-3 dead rats (outside, thank goodness - nothing brought inside) in the space of a couple of weeks, which never would have happened earlier.
Anyway, rats are not that cute so we feel no sadness when disposing of the carcasses.
Rats!
I live in a log house. I do not welcome anything that can eat it.
I’ve taken various steps to keep them out. I thought my garage cats were on a rat out there a couple weeks ago. Turns out it was a big frog. Sent him down to the pond by the grandkids.
But it made me nervous.
My indoor Siamese wouldn’t know what to do with a mouse if it wasn’t fabric with catnip inside.
The barn cat is getting old. I don’t know if she’s keeping her job up to standards. She looks kinda lazy.
We’ve had some rat problems out there. Because of stored feed. And many many hiding places.
It’s like a matter of weeks before vermin take over this place.
If I go missing, that’s why.
They sure do look cute but they are a pain in the ass when you get a bunch of them. One time I ended up finding seven in traps within the span of a week. I’m in an apartment, not a rural house. Not fun.
We live out in the middle of nowhere in NE AZ. The meeses there are deer mice, and they can spread the Hanta virus.
We had returned to AZ after visiting SCal. We walk into the house late at night to find we were the victims of a break-in. Along with missing stuff, our house had been left WIDE open.
The next morning, I sat in my recliner with a cup of coffee and my tablet, and I notice movement behind the wood stove.
I damn near had a heart attack! Nobody ever told me that deer mice look different from ordinary field mice! Don’t believe me? Go to Google images and find the picture that compares the two, side by side!
(Go ahead and look, I’ll wait…)
Deer mice have these huge freakin’ eyeballs! They remind me of the drawings of the grey aliens!
We had gotten in LATE the night before. Mr VOW was still sound asleep. I ran into the bedroom, screaming and hollering. He mumbled, “I’ll take care of it when I get up.” Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.
I wanted to stand on a chair and squeal, “EEK! A mouse!”
We tried to manage the mouse problem on our own. Ha! The mice probably had signs all over the 4 Corners area with a map to our property and the words “PARTY HOUSE!”
Get an exterminator. It’s really very reasonable, even with the fee for travel time, since we do live 30 miles from civilization. Once we got a professional, we have not seen any freakin’ alien mice from Hell.
Deer mice carry the Hanta virus in their bodies. It’s excreted in their urine. When the urine dries, the particles can be inhaled into the lungs causing an extremely nasty respiratory infection. This is often fatal.
Deer mice are not “cute.” They’re damned creepy looking.
You’re a very kind person. You’re really to be commended for the trouble you took, but I confess I just don’t have that kind of patience when it comes to rodents.
I very much love animals in general, but there is no place in my heart for disease-bearing rodents. There were mice in my previous old house and I had no compunctions whatsoever about setting out spring traps. I would not want even mice to suffer, but those things kill them instantly if they’re properly set.
The funny thing is that two of them followed me to my brand new house – I assume inside moving boxes. I noticed something that looked like pepper in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, and looking it up on the interwebs, by gad, those were mouse droppings! So I set up traps and caught the two little bastards. I think that must have been at least eight years ago – no sign of any since.
My other place was also plagued with raccoons – one even got into the house once, down the fireplace chimney like Santa Claus. I had to shoo it out the door with a broom. I think the raccoon was just as upset about the whole thing as I was!
I much prefer it here in the more sterile suburbia, where the major rodents are bunny rabbits. At least they’re harmless, AFAIK!
Mice are extremely cute, but I would be grateful if my cats would refrain from bringing them into the house, live and intact, and then dropping them at my feet so that they can immediately run off and I have to spent the next hour catching a fucking mouse while two cats watch me.
If you need to bait mousetraps (of any kind), I recommend peanut butter. They love that stuff.
