Mouse trapped in the closet...

In My Humble Opinion
1

We’ve had a pain-in-the-butt rodent taking up residence in the abode for the past week at least (that we know of). It’s the time of year I suppose. Almost positive it’s just a regular old house mouse, it’s maybe 4" long, plus tail. First it was living in some boxes/sofa in the living room when I saw it running around during the day. I laid out a few traps (the ones where the mouse goes in, and then the trap closes shut, then you throw the trap away). A few days later I was in the middle of cleaning all the paper/toys/books out of the living room (wife’s a teacher, and we have a toddler, messes abound). I then saw the mouse jump behind the boxes, so I think, “Self, that mouse be living in the boxes.” I moved all the boxes outside, and figured the mouse would be long gone by the morning.

With the boxes being outside for two days, and the wife watching intently as I moved the boxes outside (and saw no mouse escape from the box area of the living room), I figured the mouse was gone. Hell, it’s been four days since I last saw him, and I laid about six traps in the living room/kitchen area, nothing doing. I stuffed towels underneath all the other rooms that would have been accessible from the living area (i.e. the rest of the house).

Well, today I was on the puter, and our little furry friend decides to come out from wherever he was living and give me a nice glance. I open the back door to try a longshot of shoo’ing him out. Since I now removed the towels from all the rooms (I mean, he was long gone!), he was chased into probably the best place I could think of, a 3x3 hall closet filled with coats and some boxes on the floor. I found some towels and a freshly baited trap, opened the door, and he scurries for shelter deep inside a box. I lay a trap inside, and jam two bath towels underneath the door. So, I’m pretty sure he can’t get out now (though all the gnawing he has been doing, forcing me to bang on the door several times) may make it seem otherwise. :smiley:

So anyway, any opinions on what to do now to get rid of him? He’s been in there for maybe 12 hours now, and I was planning on going in to check the trap sometime late tomorrow. But, I’m wondering what to do if he doesn’t go for the trap. I don’t want to clean out the closet and have him escape to parts unknown. I have thought of an idea to maybe make a pathway out of something (since the front outside door is near the closet), like some cardboard/sheet metal and get him out that way, but from what I’ve heard/read, mice can jump fairly high (at least a foot maybe?).

So, I’m looking for opinions now. For now, let’s assume the exterminator is out, since I’m not sure he could do much anyway, the mouse is safely contained, he’s not in the walls, and there are traps in there.

2

Toss a cat in there. :smiley:

3

4" plus tail? That’s either a big mouse or a small rat. Or a very ugly pixie.

4

Yes, you need to hire a cat. Whether it’s a mouse or a rat, you need to get a cat.

5

One cheap homemade humane mouse trap: the milk bottle trap.

Get an empty milk jug and a ruler. Put something easy to clim onto like a box next to the milk jug. Make bridge from the ruler from the box to the rim of the milk jug. Put some food around, especially a tiny amount on the ruler and some inside the jug. Peanuts and shredded cheese works.

Note that if you have an infestation, a 2nd mouse won’t climb into a previously used milk jug trap. So you need a frest one each time.

6

Yeah, I agree with Case Sensitive – not a mouse. House mice are tiny – an inch and a half long, I reckon. Four inches is smallish for a rat, but there are different kinds of rats. Maybe it’s an escaped hamster? Anyway, the one thing you don’t want to do is poison it. A poisoned rat will disappear into your walls and you won’t be able to find it for anything, but you’ll smell it for weeks on end.

Rent a cat, or better yet, a python. Failing that, put out rat traps. They’re like mouse traps, only bigger.

7

I’m guessing you don’t have * a * mouse, but several mice. But that’s a bit irrelevant. I’ve faced the mouse-in-the-house problem many times, thanks to a playful cat that thought I’d want to help play with the new toys that she found in the basement. Your basic mouse removal tool is a tupperware bowl and a piece of cardboard. Slap the bowl on top of the mouse, slip the cardboard underneath, and then dispose of the mouse as your conscience dictates. However, be sure to inform your conscience that as soon as you drop the mouse outside, it will come right back in.

In your case, if the mouse hasn’t gone for the trap, I’d be worried that it would nibble it’s way out or find a crack in the back of the closet and be gone. Doesn’t take much for a mouse to vanish. So I’d be proactive about catching and removing it.

BTW, peanut butter is the ultimate bait for mice. With a toddler, you obviously have to be careful about what kind of traps you use and where you put them. I never found that the little plastic live traps were worth a damn, although the wire Havaharts are pretty good. And there’s a wind up trap that I’ve had very good luck with if you have a multiple mouse problem.

8

I’ve never seen a mouse that’s 4" in my life. Sounds like a young rat to me.

Rats have bigger eyes, smaller ears and head vs. their body size. Their tails are thicker and tapered. Mice have a fat little round body, smallish more pointed nose, big round ears more to the side of the head, and teeny little eyes. Their tails look like a bit of string.

Once you get rid of it (them), check for holes in the wall and patch up any place they may get in with steel wool or heavy wire mesh. Rodents don’t like chewing through metal (mice especially), but if they’re rats you need something pretty heavy because rats are powerful chewers. They can chew their way out of a corrugated cardboard box within minutes, and fabric is nothing. I wouldn’t be suprised if you open your closet to just find a hole in the back of that box and a missing rodent. You should’ve gotten rid of the critter as soon as you knew you had it trapped. All you did was give it time to chew up your stuff and escape.

Anyway, your best bet is probably just trying to trap and kill it; if you want to live release you’ll be feeding the local owl and feral cat population because house mice/rats rarely survive out in fields. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Just don’t do what one lady on this board did that I read about – use a glue trap then throw the critter in the trash can so it could starve to death over several days. Have the balls to kill it yourself, or trap live and let it go far away from any human residences so nature can take its course.

9

Another “that probably isn’t a mouse”. And stuffing towels isn’t likely to stop them. Mice and rats like to chew. They like to make dens out of shredded stuff. And if you have one, you probably have more than one. You could try the snap traps, although the rat traps are scary and hurt like hell if you snap yourself. I didn’t have luck with my cats or dogs catching rodents. I found poison worked, but then you have dead rodents who-knows-where. In the end, the combination of snap traps and poison got rid of the rats that came into my 150-year old farmhouse during the winter last year. I live in the middle of hundreds of acres of farmland, and neighboring farmers made it sound like this was routine. Routine for them, maybe. Ick.

StG

10

We used to live next door to a large field. My cat used to catch mice and bring them in the cat door for a game of “smack the mouse around”.

Many times the mouse wouldn’t die (my cat has ADD) and end up hiding someplace in the house. One time the bugger took up a home in the kitchen behind the fridge. He’d climb up the back of the fridge to the top where we kept the cat food. We didn’t notice he was there until we started to smell his nest.

We couldn’t catch the bastard or chase him out. He’d steal the goodie out of snap traps everytime.

We bought some sticky traps made for rats and baited them with peanut butter. About 6 of them were placed around the kitchen. Within a few days he was stuck. Worked like a charm.

Peanut butter is the #1 best bait.

11

No love for the ugly pixie theory, then?

12

Rats are pretty smart. A lot harder to trap than dumb ol’ mice. If a rat has had a close call with a trap or seen another rat get killed/snared by a particular trap, that rat is smart enough to not go for it. A mouse is a sucker for peanut butter. And those snap trap with the hair triggers can catch 'em pretty fast.

Sounds like you have a pretty savvy rat. Maybe try several different traps. Obviously the ones you have he ain’t going for. Good luck!

13

No man, it’s R. Kelly :eek:

Watch your kid carefully, that’s all I’m gunna say. :stuck_out_tongue:

14

One thing you could try is cleaning out the closet to find the hole{s}, then stuffing them with steel wool pads {the soap impregnated ones for preference} doused in Tabasco - we had an infestation of Rattus Kellius in our flat when I was a student - and finding the holes behind the stove and then plugging them with something that tough to chew and disgusting to eat kept the little buggers out.

The less practical but more fun approach is to arm yourself with an air pistol, lay out some bait {I used a .177 BSF S20 and sultanas - there was talk of soaking them in Malibu in order to stupefy the rats and thus make them easier to hit, but this was dismissed as possibly being against the Geneva Convention, and a waste of perfectly good Malibu - if there is such a thing - to boot}, and then sit up all night with a friend taking turns shooting at them when they pop out. Of course, large quantities of beer and the Malibu you didn’t use to spike the bait are required to while away the time, but you can use the empty beer cans for target practice in order to hone your skills. You’ll be too drunk to hit anything smaller than a hippopotamus by the time anything remotely verminous does condescend to appear, of course, but laughing so much you won’t care.

15

THAT’S WHAT I SAID!!!

We have mice all the time, cuz we live on the edge of the woods. Our mice are about 2" long, with a tail of equal length.

Our cats catch them all the time. Problem is, they LIKE them. Think they’re fun! They rarely kill them.

We have one now, but it’s laying low. I wish they’d get that blood instinct and take the little fuckers out already!

16

Well, minor update (if anyone cares), no, still haven’t caught him.

I built a (supposedly) impenetrable pathway made out of towels, sofas, boxes, and various other objects, to the front door, in an attempt to get him outside. Well, after several minutes of running around and being a pain, he found a hole I forgot to towel, and escaped back into the house. I bought four humane/release traps (with the one-way doors) afterwards. I have now used cheese, peanut butter, and peanut butter with honey, no luck on anything. Bunch of dust bunnies on the floor in the kitchen, so he might be getting them from under the fridge.

After getting several good looks at him in the closet when I cleared it out, and it was just him and nothing else, he is probably closer to 2.5-3", plus tail. Today I finally pulled out the nukes and bought eight big glue traps. I’ve read horror stories about inhumane they are, but then again, I’ve given this thing plenty of chances!

Called my parents tonight, and my dad told me to try lunch meat in the humane traps one last time before unleashing the big guns, so I relented and promised to bait the humane traps with lunch meat tonight. The glue traps will go down in the morning, since the wife has been freaking out for over a week now. :stuck_out_tongue:

17

If you can handle the smell, try tuna fish. You want something it’s going to know is there – if he’s not coming close to the traps, the peanut butter may not be strong for him to smell it. The stuff in oil would be even better. They like oil and fatty things.

18

The traps will get him…

…patience is necessary. Be sure to place them perpendicular to a wall, as they tend to run along walls.

I like snap traps best - for max effectiveness, smear peanut butter on a cotton ball and tie the cotton ball to the trigger.

Snap traps are humane - its over in a heartbeat for them. DONT catch him in release him outside - he will do anything he can to get back in.

19

We have an exterminator service and still have mice. We have out four poison bait stations, and many glue boards which were placed by the exterminator. We still have mice. We put out our own glue boards and baited them with peanut butter, and we still have mice. It’s not like we live out in the country surrounded by mice - we live in a rowhouse with neighbours on each side. Both sides have pets, and they chase the mice into our place. It’s impossible to block up any cracks between our walls and theirs, as mice can get through a hole the size of a dime.

When we do catch mice on a glue trap, Dave will take them out and kill them. I don’t even touch them. I’ve observed that more often than not, they end up head-first in the glue and they suffocate before we get to them (which isn’t very long after, as we check the traps regularly). I hate the little fuckers.

20

I REALLY want to apologize for resurrecting this zombie thread after 18 months, but I saw this thread when searching for another self-started thread for some old information, and realized I never ended the story.

A few days of trying the additional lunchmeat/glue/whatever traps, I wondered about the sofas, since he always seemed to be in the living room. Lifted them up, and there were some holes through the underside covering (that was stapled to the frame). I wasn’t sure if he lived in there, but I lifted the sofas and tipped them on the walls for a few days, and looked them over carefully. After a few weeks of no mouse/rat, I figured he finally just took off.

Well, fast forward maybe 4-6 months later, I hear a very loud scraping that sounded like it was right underneath the kitchen sink. I determined he was in the wall between the sink and the exterior wall, and was really freaked out, so I called an exterminator. The exterminator steel wooled some exterior small holes to be safe, as well as the holes between the pipes and the cabinets in the kitchen/bathrooms. He also laid out many 25-cent glue traps all over the house/garage.

A few months later (now August 2006), I was in the garage one night and saw an unbelievable amount of rat poop. I don’t know how I missed it before, but I was really freaked out now (we had a lot of school books/boxes stored in the garage). So I called the friends in for an emergency garbage haul/cleanup. A few days later when we started working, we had a dead mouse/rat in a glue trap. :slight_smile: In the process of cleaning, we found one of those Easter foil-wrapped chocolate thingies that was sitting in the hot garage for probably 2 years, and was just a powder. Apparently that’s what the mouse/rat was eating. When moving the boxes, we also discovered a 3 inch or so diameter hole in the plaster wall. I taped up the hole (intending to patch it up later, which still hasn’t been done :D), and moved the boxes into the middle of the garage.

No mouse/rat problems since. Ants on the other hand…