Our cabin in the woods is infested with mice. Apart from trying to find where they’re coming in, we’re looking at poisons. I came across this:
“For taking care of pesky mice problems leave a small, low sided dish of MONSTER Energy Drink in a place not accessable to pets. Mice LOVE this stuff, guzzling it down & die within minutes. Works almost instantly, is less expensive than DeCon. Tried & true by my son sharing his MONSTER Energy Drink with a mouse at our very old farmhouse. Within minutes it was dead. No more having to search for smelly, dead mice. (He was only trying to share his drink, was not expecting the mouse to expire in front of him.)” 5 Best DIY Fruit Fly Traps - Farmers' Almanac - Plan Your Day. Grow Your Life. (at the bottom of the page, in comments)
When I googled the topic, most of the hits were about dead mice found in cans of Monster or Red Bull.
Here’s an academic article on its effect on rabbits but the opening line in the abstract robs it of credibility for me:
“Red bull has been known as a healthy drink within many populations.”
So would the caffeine be deadly to mice? Can anyone find any actual research on this?
Actually, a 19g house mouse would only need to drink 10% of a can of Red Bull to consume the necessary 6.973mg to kill it. I think? A can has around 77mg of caffeine. How much do mice drink?
My take on this “rodenticide” is that it would work only if mice became convulsed with hilarity over humans setting out cans of Red Bull for them, and died of laughter.*
See also the myriad useless formulations guaranteed anecdotally to kill fire ants.
*mainly, I highly doubt mice are irresistibly attracted to Red Bull.
One of the downsides of killing mice with poison is that they will die in totally unexpected places : sometimes inside drywall!!! Before you poison them, please consider that.
I dunno nuttin’ ‘bout killin’ mice.
But it shure does make a whole buncha sense to me that Red Bull would work.
I tired it once, and damn that stuff is vile.
. After only one or two sips (about the quantity that a mouse might drink) , I tossed the can.
Now,I suppose that if the can had fallen on a mouse, then , yeah, the mouse would have died. And it would have been a less painful death than drinking from the contents.
But the flugtag was fun. Just make sure you that when you go to the snack bar, you buy a cola, not a Red Bull.
@running_coach is correct, a can of Red Bull is 250ml, so it weighs 250g. 10% would be 25ml or 25g. That seems to be a stretch to drink roughly more than it’s body weight in Red Bull.
I’d call this folk tale bullshit and busted.
@gkster as far as options to kill large numbers of mice go: we had an infestation at our cottage and used a homemade “bucket trap”. It worked amazing, You can google it.
In my DIY search I stumbled across Shawn Woods on Youtube:
Each week he tests and reports on different mouse traps (and other pest traps from wasps to voles etc). He shows you how to make a bucket trap among many others.
That is one reason why common rodenticides like D-Con use an anticoagulant. They used to use warfarin, but now more likely use brodifacoum, which has a much longer half-life in the rodent’s body so that sublethal doses will build up. One of the effects of the anticoagulant is that the rat or mouse will become extremely thirsty, causing them to seek water so they won’t die in the walls.
Other reason’s not to use poison might be that it’s an exceedingly nasty way for the rodent to die - they basically internally hemmorhage to death. Another is that animals up the food chain eat the anticoagulant loaded mouse.
