I’ve had mice before, best solution I found (if you don’t have pets or small children) is d-CON. The mice eat it, it poisons them, they go off to die elsewhere. No having to clean or dispose of traps. Though the classic snap-traps do work well, I hate having to pick up a nasty dead mouse. And glue-traps are cruel and disgusting.
Poison and glue traps are nasty, but sometimes necessary. I swear I do not understand this, but some mice know about traps. This is what I went though once:
Mouse wasn’t going in snap trap, so I thought I’d trick him. I put peanut butter in the place I was going to put the trap for several nights in a row. Every morning the peanut butter was gone. Then I put peanut butter on the trap, but didn’t set the trap. The peanut butter was gone. Then I set the trap with the peanut butter. He didn’t touch it. WTF?! The trap had never been used, so no dead mouse smell or anything…
Also, what do you guys do when you get one in a glue trap? I put them in a newspaper and smash them with a brick. But it’s no fun seeing a little mouse so scared 
I’ve still got at least one in the house, but the handyman’s work was good. No traces of mouse droppings near where the suspected entry point was.
Only a very few near the trash can.
But, no takers on the peanut butter baited traps, either.
I’ve made bucket traps before… im the only person i know who hasnt caught anything in them… its basically a bucket with enough water in the bottom to drown in, with a can with a wire through it which is baited. Once they jump on the can they can’t balance for long and are spun off into the water.
Of course, when they go off to die somewhere, they’re rarely so considerate as to simply leave the house. They go to some hole somewhere and die in your walls or under some piece of furniture or something. Then you have slowly rotting mouse corpses somewhere in your house, possibly places that you can’t possibly reach.
Exactly. I had that happen and the house STUNK for over a month. It was nauseating.
I’d leave traps set all the time, bait them with peanut butter. I like this type. The mouse can only approach the bait from one direction and they are easier to set than traditional traps.
HA!
A victory!
The rotational mousetraps got one!
Bad news–mice are in my bedroom, probably in the heating/AC unit.
Expensive cleaning & repairs will be needed.
But the bedroom mouse/mice are nibbling at the bait units.
I keel you! :knife-wielding emoticon:
Ack, I would have died. Died, I say!
I do believe it is pronounced “Ah kih yew.”
Poison baits are a very bad thing to use - if another critter gets to the poisoned rodent, it can and does cause harm to the other critter. Never use baits/poisons.
I’ve treated very sick cats and dogs at the veterinary hospital that were affected after they ate mice that had injested baits. Even with intense medical care, many of those patients still died. Bleedouts from baits are a cruel way to die.
Mr. Neville had one run over his hand once when he reached into a bag of cat food. He yelled, but not nearly as loud as I would have. If it had happened to me, people in Australia would have been asking me to keep it down.
Oh, how I hear ya. Dude, mousegate happened in July and there are still mousetraps in my apartment, even though I haven’t seen another mouse since. This is how much of a crazy person I am about this. Yeah, I’m pretty sure people down under heard me shriek when Mickey was crashing my apartment.
Right now we think we have a mouse in the kitchen.
I say “think” because the only thing we’ve actually seen to indicate a mouse is the orange cat’s renewed interest in the kitchen - particularly under the fridge.
I hope he either gets the mouse, or the mouse gets the hint and takes off. My mother is deathly afraid of mice and will scream like crazy if she sees one.
Oddly enough, the gray cat (who is 17lbs and bites like a pitbull) shows no interest in the kitchen. I wonder if he thinks the orange cat is crazy, or simply doesn’t find a mouse worth his time or interest. Weird.
Look for the lil brown “caraway seeds” he leaves behind.
BTW–had the H/AC folks in. There was a hole–put there by my former H/AC repair guys. Covered over by a metal plate, now.
Almost every place I’ve lived in the last 20 years got mice at least once, but never for very long (evil grin). As well as keeping food in tins or other places they can’t reach (very key), my preferred method is snap traps, and Gummi bears for bait. Gummi bears stay sticky, unlike peanut butter which dries out, and you want a sticky bait to hold the mouse long enough for the bar to snap down.
The other key is trap placement; ideally you want to find their trails and place the trap’s bait end right in their path, preferably at a place where they’ll have to step over it to keep going. This can result in setting traps next to furniture and at right angles to the walls, for example, which looks odd but does work.
To figure out their trails, remember mice will never cross an open space if they can avoid it; they’ll get from one side of a room to the other by sidling the long way around the walls instead of running across. They like to always have one side of their bodies against a surface (thigmotaxis, is the technical term). Also, any trail they use a lot will acquire a layer of pee–it’s they way they mark a safe route.
Oh, and get a Biro stick ballpoint pen; the barrel is almost the exact thickness of an adult mouse skull. If you can stick the pen into a crack or crevice and move it back and forth an inch or so, that’s a space a mouse can fit through; if the skull goes through, the rest of the mouse will flatten out and follow. So those are the spaces to block off or seal up.
If we have a gift exchange, I know what I’m mailing to MeanOldLady. Maybe we can hear her scream from thousands of miles away!
Hope the mice are not stuck in there. They smell is horrible if they die and rot in there.
Never? Even if I don’t have any pets or small children, and I place them inside my house where no pets should be?
Sorry, don’t agree.
There is at least one mouse left, and he is avoiding the traps, humane, sticky and rotary.
I’ve seen one twice today–once in the AM, once around 7PM in the living room.
Suggestions for speeding up their deaths/removal?
Nuke it from space?