I have a mouse. No, not a pet mouse, a city mouse who has moved into my apartment.
I have multiple live-catch traps set but he refuses to go into any of them. They’re full of peanut butter, cheese, cheerios, chips, crackers, carrots and raisins and seeds. He’s not afraid of me anymore and will sit and stare at me from 5 feet away. I say “Mouse! Get in the damn traps!” but he won’t listen. He has a crooked tail and if I snap my fingers at him, he twitches his tail like he’s mad.
When I go to bed at night I lay awake hoping to hear the sound of a trap door snapping shut. If I wake up to use the washroom I peek down the hall to see if he’s caught. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning or come home from work is look to see if I’ve won. I’m constantly turning to look at the area he hangs out to see if he’s there.
This has been going on for two weeks.
Any suggestions? Maybe something that mice just can’t resist?
He’s getting food from under my budgie cage. I vacuum every day and have spill catchers on the cage but there’s always a stray seed or two under there. But I’d think that, even though he has some seeds, he’d love some peanut butter and cheerios!
Yeah…I’d rather not torture small animals. If it got to a point where I was worried about it, I’d use a trap that would kill it instantly. For now I’m going to continue with the live traps and see if he won’t give the treats a try.
My sister used to work in a mouse/rat lab. She told me that they would train the rodents by getting them hooked on Froot Loops, which the rats found irresistibly addictive. I tried it with my year-long vermin infestation (thanks to being cat-less for the 1st time in 30+ years) and it worked! I scattered the cereal around so that the rats would get hooked, also put some in traps along their pathways, and, bam! Have caught 7 rats so far with the Froot Loops.
I also tried some rodent attractant from the hardware store. I caught a couple of rats, but they quickly lost interest. Froot Loops worked much better!
Use Nutella to bait the traps. I think they like that better than cheese or peanut butter. I’ve never failed to catch a mouse with Nutella. One exceptionally smart mouse eluded me for about three days. Usually it only takes a day or two.
Put the traps in paths where the mice are going to go. Usually that’s around the edges of the room and in corners. If you’ve seen the mouse, you know where it hangs out, so use that to figure out where you can put the trap so it will walk through it.
One more tip: When you’re using the live traps, don’t let the mice go right outside your house. They’ll come right back in. Take them further away before you let them out.
I don’t have a cat but I have been shaming the budgies for not being birds of prey. I’m going to take him to a big field area a couple of blocks away. I haven’t seen him tonight which is odd. He’s always here in the evening so maybe he found his way out, or he might be visiting other apartments, too, and they might not be as soft-hearted as I am.
I had an issue with mice a few years ago. Some things that I have noticed:
While I appreciate the idea behind live traps, I have found the traditional traps more effective. They can often work within minutes.
Peanut Butter is the best bait but you have to be careful to not put too much on. Very little will do. Too much and the trap will snap while the mouse is far enough away to not get trapped and then he will just finish off the bait. This is bad (see below).
Put the trap in an open space, not against a wall. Look where the mouse poops and put the trap there. That is a place he will go. For me, under the sink would always work.
If the mouse gets the bait but not the trap I think it either makes them crazy due to the sugar or makes them think you are feeding them because when that happened to me the mouse became more “aggressive”. He would start to come out in the open, during the day and be less afraid. It was very gross.
These. You are at a disadvantage living in an apartment - if you share walls with neighbors you can make sure mice don’t have access to a single crumb of food in your space (and you do need to do that; make your own space as unattractive to them as possible) but you can’t control anyone else’s.
That said, you can continue to try putting the traps in the places where mice like to travel. They do tend to be curious - I’ve caught mice using no bait at all just by putting the traps in the places they like to go, and they can’t resist checking the trap out. We have better control of our space, though, since it’s a detached house and we can make sure they don’t have access to any food anywhere inside. We use these traps, and they’ve worked very well for us (here’s proof) - mice like to try coming inside at this time of year, when the weather starts to cool off and natural food sources get scarce.
If you succeed in catching any, you will need to take them at least a mile away, or they’ll just come back.
My tips (based on years of apartment living): Gummi bears, gumdrops or other sticky candy for bait. Mice like sweets, and a sticky sweet will detain them at the trap.
Place the traps over the mouse’s travel routes. Find the routes by looking for mouse poop and pee, since they excrete wherever they go. Mice don’t like crossing open spaces, so they’ll chose routes along walls, alongside furniture, any route that lets them keep against a solid body (they’re thigmotaxic, if you want the technical term). Best is to find a bottleneck, e.g. between furniture and the wall, and place the trap right across it.
You can also consider poison bait, though they usually result in the mouse dying somewhere inaccessible and stinking out your home as it decays, by way of posthumous revenge.
Cats only work if they’re good at mousing; not all cats are.
[URL=“