Mouse in the House/Questions

Factual Questions
1

We have lived in a townhouse for 5-10 years. This year, for the first time, we have mice. I bought traps from Home Depot and set them up. In each of the past three nights, I have caught 1-2 mice.

I called several pest control places and they all want to set up bait traps where the mice eat the bait, then get incredibly thirsty, find their way outside, and die. My concern is that I have a toddler and an infant in the house and I’m not convinced this is safe enough. I could keep up my current system, but I’m not sure I am catching them as fast as they are breeding or getting in.

Does anyone have any suggestions or info about this, or any other general tips about dealing with the mice?

Thanks for your help.

2

Rat/mice poison will most likely kill your child if it gets into it. There are those sticky traps. They work alright but none of them work as well as a cat. The cat may suck the breath out of your infant while it sleeps, mwuhahahaha, but at least you won’t have mice.

The Eldritch Horrors will be appeased.
A Demon Plaything

3

I wouldn’t use sticky traps. I’d recommend Havahart live traps, which will trap the mice and then you can release them, and there will be no danger to your child. If you don’t want to release them for fear they will just come back in, at least use spring traps so they likely die instantly.

Sticky traps are cruel. Mice will chew their tail or legs off to get away from them, and yes, I have seen this with my own eyes in my own bathroom closet. Or they’ll stay stuck until they starve to death or get crushed in a garbage can.

Not all cats are good mousers. You really shouldn’t get one solely to serve as an exterminator. Even if they are good mousers, they can catch all variety of parasites from eating little critters, some of which are transmittable to humans.

You can get Havahart traps at www.havahart.com. I think Home Depot sells them too.

4

Sometimes you have to make a tradeoff, and I concur that leaving poison bait around house with children under the age of about 6 is a very, very bad idea. Better to put up with a few mice than have to look up the 1-800 poison control number in the middle of the night.

I’ve had good luck with both the Havahart live traps and with the old reliable snap-trap. Use peanut butter for bait, and set it after the babies are in bed. If they do manage to get up before you do, it won’t kill them to eat the peanut butter and have a mousetrap snap on their little fingers. Demonstrate the “Ouchie! A BIG finger pinch! Don’t touch!” factor of the snap trap to the toddler before you set it. Most toddlers will understand this intuitively if demonstrated on a pencil, without having to actually experience it.

The biggest problem with releasing the live mouse outside is that he’ll just come right back in again the next night. Mice are not stupid–last night he located a place that was safe, warm, and full of food, and if you give him a chance, he’ll be back tonight. And the next night. And the next night…

Put the traps in places where you see mouse turds, or where you’ve seen mice and/or caught mice in the past. They follow urine scent trails.

And, bear in mind, the mice likely aren’t looking for permanent quarters, just a temporary winter home. So this is unlikely to be a year-round problem. It’s a townhouse, in town?

IMO a cat isn’t much use as a mouser unless it’s been taught to catch mice by its mother, which usually means a half-wild barn cat. Which you probably don’t want in your nice townhouse, and which probably would take off out the open door the first chance it got.

5

Every winter we used to get the nasty little things.

I also have children in the house, so I wasn’t comfortable about using rat poison. The first thing we did was crawl around the house to find any openings they might be getting into. No hole is too small for them, if they can get their heads in, their bodies will fit too. If you don’t fill in the holes, anything else you do will only be a tempory fix.

After that, we set traps in the places where they left “evidence” that they had been there. Peanut butter works really well in the traps. The mice have to crawl up there and lick at it, they can’t really run away with the peanut butter.

I don’t recomend using the sticky papers. I’ve never used them, but I’ve heard the mice will chew their leg off if neccessary. I don’t know if that’s true but I really don’t want to find out.

I don’t think cats work too well either. Our neighbors have cats and they still get mice, however, we haven’t had any mice for three years now. :smiley:

6

Use an old-fashioned mousetrap. This is what my parents always used, I’ve used it, it works.

What you need:

1 empty soda or beer can
1 large bucket, like a drywall bucket
something to put holes in the bucket
1 piece of wire, like a straightened-out wire coathanger
1 piece of wood, or something like wood, long enough to create a ramp from the floor to the bucket.
peanut butter
water

Instructions:

  1. Punch a couple holes in the top rim of the bucket. They need to be big enough for the wire to go through.
  2. Punch a hole in the bottom of the can, big enough for the wire to go through.
  3. String the wire through one of the holes in the bucket. String the can on the wire. String the other end of the wire through the hole in the other side of the rim of the bucket. You will now have a wire with a can on it balanced across the middle of the bucket.
  4. Put a few inches of water in the bottom of the bucket.
  5. Smear peanut butter on the can.
  6. Smear a little bit of peanut butter on whatever you’re using as a ramp. Not too much - this is just to entice mousy to climb up. Lean pb-covered ramp against the bucket, creating a bridge for mousy to climb up.

The idea here is that the mice climb up the ramp, onto the wire to get to the peanut butter on the can. When they climb on the can, it rotates, and dumps the mouse in the water. It then drowns, and the trap is primed for the next mouse.

At night put the whole contraption in areas where you suspect mice. In the morning, you’ll have a few in the bucket. Repeat until the mousies are gone.

7

I would still suggest a cat. I read somewhere that the scent of a cat actually repels the rodents. I know that since I have had a cat, I have never had roaches or mice even when my neighbors would get them. I won’t do the research to since the anecdotal evidence is more than enough for me.

I like the ingeniously evil mouse drowning invention. Ingenious.

A friend in need is a pest.
A Demon Plaything

8

Don’t use rat poison because it may contain warfarin which can be hazardous to the health of humans. If ingested, it causes internal bleeding in the digestive tract and possibly can cause brain hemorrhage. If this happens, a person who is infected with warfarin needs injections of vitamin K which helps to counteract the warfarin.

Never use rat poison if you have children or pets in your home.

Of course, any rat poison is dangerous to children and pets whether it contains warfarin or not.

9

You might be right about the cat scent scaring mousies away. I agree with this, even though I don’t have any hard evidence either. At my last apartment I never once saw a cockroach even though the building supposedly had them, and believe me, I tried to find them. (Yes, I had cockroach paranoia.) I think the bugs saw all those claws and fangs and moved on to somewhere more hospitable.

10

The mouse bait contains coumadin, an anti-coagulant.
Lethal dose is very dependent on size of animal, so your child is likely safe from it. If you have high blood pressure you could eat some and you’d be on anti-coagulant therapy. Of course better safe than sorry.

Big problem with the bait is the the mice don’t always go outside or out in the open to die, sometimes they die in the walls and smell for a long time until they dry up.

Spring traps or glue boards are the way to go.

11

My sister is using some ultrasonic devices for keeping mice away. The ones she has had been used by my Aunt and Uncle in their basement apartment and they swore by them. My sister has not had any mice since she started using them (maybe two years). She has two cats but the cats themselves didn’t seem to deter the mice. I’ve seen a version at Home Depot that plug directly into a wall outlet, no wires. The ones my sister has are on an electrical cord with a plug. I have no idea what they’re called but I wouldn’t think they’d be too hard to find if you were interested in trying them.
etc.

12

We used to have a rat problem in our house. At night, you could hear them scurrying around in the walls. We used a live trap, and we caught every single one of those beady-eyed buggers. In all, there were about 6 of them. After catching them, we would drive somewhere away from our house to release them; this way, they wouldn’t be able to (easily) find their way back. Our house has been rat-free ever since.

13

I know someone who tried to fix a mouse problem by getting a cat. The cat never went after the mice, and the mice didn’t care at all that the cat was around. They ended up trying several different traps until they found one that worked.

This of course left them with a cat with no useful skills that they had to feed and take care of for the next decade and a half.

I was watching a television show about the making of some mouse movie (Stuart Little, maybe). On that, they said that to train the mice, they went to exterminators, since exterminators were the best experts on mouse behavior. One trait that mice have is that they will make invisble “paths” around your house, and they will follow them and not stray much to either side. For the movie, they took advantage of this and trained the mouse to follow a set path through whatever set they wanted the mouse to go. I have since learned to take advantage of this myself by placing traps in narrow areas (like behind the stove) where I’ve seen the mouse go, or places where I’ve seen mouse poop and other evidence of mouse presense. In my experience, you are much more likely to get the little bugger if you do this. The mice ignore a lot of the other traps I set.

I happen to live in a rural area, and get invaded by field mice every year as the weather starts getting cold. Peanut butter on plain old fashioned mouse traps has worked the best in my experience. This year has been particularly bad due to the fact that my children keep leaving a door to the garage open, and the mice get into the unfinished rooms I have on that side of the house. It took me about 2 weeks from the first mouse sighting to the time when the last mouse was killed and there has been no more mouse evidence, with a total of 8 mice caught.

Keep at it with the cheap traps. They work just as well as anything a “professional” can do (IMHO), and you will eventually get them all.

I also have children, and I use the old fashioned spring type traps. I have to be careful where I place them, so that a child won’t be tempted to touch it and break their finger. You can try the have-a-heart type traps, but in my experience they aren’t as effective.

14

We got our cat when she was between 6 and 7 weeks old and she was nearly helpless for a short while. She lived inside the house or tied outside for a few hours on nice afternoons for the next 5 years before my mom decided to let neko roam free rather than putting her on a leash. That first summer she’d bring in about five kills on a good day.

15

Cats can actually be counterproductive in removal of mice. A case in point:

The house I live in has a female cat who’s a good mouser. Several times she’s brought dead mice to me. (Why do cats do that anyway?) But last night when she brought me a mouse, she forgot to kill it first. It escaped and got into the storeroom. So now we have a mouse in the house where we didn’t used to have one.

16

Something I’d like to add to this is that you have to keep any food sources locked up tight. Cover the garbage cans tightly, don’t leave food on the counter for any length of time, and if you do spill anything, try to wipe it up, vaccuum, and disinfect as thoroughly as you can after. This will help to keep the food smells down, and the mice won’t have interesting smells attracting them to your kitchen or dining area.

I know that mice will chew through boxes to get at food, so make sure that you have things like cereal in airtight containers, even if it’s only a well-sealed Ziploc baggie. Think of this as though you were camping and trying to keep all the “beasties” out of your supplies.

Another thing that works on mousetraps is gum drops or gummy bears. Smush them a little with your fingers, or warm them enough to make them gooey, and press them onto the trapspring device. Make sure that they aren’t just going to sit there and fall off, or the mice will simply pull them off the traps without any fuss.

Some bad news, though. Mice mature VERY quickly - in about 9 weeks. They can then breed. They gestate for about that same 9 weeks, and once they have those babies, it’s only 9 more weeks till you have babies again, exponentially! I used to keep mice as pets, and the first one I got was a pregnant (unbeknownst to me) female. In short order I was giving them away to the school for science projects, trying to con friends into taking them off my hands, and as much as I abhorred it, even thinking about giving them to people I knew with meat-eating pets of their own. I finally had to get rid of all of them, as the smell was more than I could keep up with. Even cleaning cages twice a week wasn’t enough!

Another pet that might help to rid you of your vermin visitors is a ferret. They love to get into the same small places that mice like, and they hate them. They can be vicious little things when it comes to rodents, but they also have an “odor” problem. If you do get one, make sure that it’s descented, and that you bathe it at least once a week. They’re not the easiest animals to take care of, but they are fun little things! Especially straight out of a bath!

Hope some of this helps.

17

Mice love peanut butter,wipe it on a mouse trap the trigger part.Set the trap and wait.I had a small house I was renting in NJ and it worked like a charm.
Had to get rid of at least ten of the buggers.

18

I second everyone who said don’t use poison. Mice don’t sit around and eat till they’re full. They carry it away and hide it. Thus, the possibility that food in your pantry will be contaminated, or that you’ll find bait pellets in closets and slippers and such does exist. Also, the line about them getting thirsty and going outside to die while they look for water is a crock. No one can guarantee that. They may die before they get outside, or they may become too sick to move before they get outside. If they die in some inaccessible part of the house, they’ll stink for a week, and you’ll just have to live with it. The pest control companies who suggested poison were very irresponsible, in my professional opinion.

Glue boards work well, as sometimes you get multiple catches on the large ones. If you dislike the idea of them possibly mutilating themselves or dying a lingering death, then don’t use them. Snap traps are quick and painless, but multiple catches are out, and you have to make sure you check them daily. Put them where you see evidence and in corners (mice huddle with their backs to a corner when they eat, so they know nothing is sneaking up behind them). Place the device perpendicular to the wall, with the trigger closest to the wall. That way they will catch a mouse approaching from either direction.

Do an inspection, also. Since mice can fit through a hole no larger than a dime, it’s impossible to find every access point, but there may be a place near a door or a pipe or cable where something has deteriorated and created a space large enough for them to get in. Then seal it. Start your inspection near where you see the most evidence, and don’t neglect crawl spaces and garages. Those are also prime spots for traps. Peanut butter works well as an attractact, as does a cotton ball soaked in vanilla extract (don’t know why, but it works).

Keep in mind that mice are good climbers, and can access a hole higher up than you might give them credit for. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to seal pipe openings under your sinks and in the laundry, too.

Don’t worry about them reproducing faster than you can catch them. At the beginning, you’ll probably catch adult mice. Then, as time goes on, you’ll catch smaller adolescents who are forced to forage further to find their food, as the adults aren’t around to bring food back to the nest. Any babies won’t be able to sustain themselves after that. And, if you seal as many access points as you can find, you may eliminate future problems

19

Bzzzzzzzzzt. Wrong answer. I have a cat, and mice too. We use the snap traps, but the little boogers have figured out how to lick the PB off and stay alive. Every so often we get one, but not all.

20

Thanks for everyone’s comments. Based in large part on your suggestions, we are going to stay away from poison. I am using the no-kill traps and then driving the mice I find a mile away. Also we have found a few places around the house that could use some addional sealing.

In case anyone has any more comments or suggestions, I will continue to check back for a few days.

  • Stephen