Here is the situation. I live in a townhouse where the front door is on the middle floor and opens into a little entryway which is down three steps from the main floor. I rarely use this entrance and usually go in and out through my garage. The last time I used the front door was probably over a week ago. Today I went to the front door to get a package and lying on the floor was a dead mouse. I have been in this house for 22 years and have never seen a mouse although for at least 18 of those years I had at least one cat. As far as I know my cats never killed a mouse. At least they never brought me one as a present.
This is my mouse history so skip this paragraph if you want. In my previous apartment I once saw a mouse run across my bedroom. I went out and bought snap traps which I baited with peanut butter. The next day there was a dead mouse in one of them. I left the traps up figuring where there is one there is more and maybe his homies would.come looking for him. The traps never triggered again but I often found the peanut butter gone. Since I was going away for a weekend I added some glue traps. I came back and everything looked fine but when I opened a cabinet I found an old box of crackers with the corner chewed off and crumbs everywhere. On looking closer I noticed that one of the glue traps was stuck to the bottom of the cabinet. I peeled it off and found a tail. Now this was not a little mouse tail. This was the size of a rat tail. So I figured that now I had an angry maimed rat after me . I did the only thing I could. I moved.
So here is my problem. How did this mouse get in and does he have friends with him? More important, what did he die from? Is this a canary in the coal mine thing designed to warn me of toxins in my home? If the mouse was dying, why would he choose an open foyer to die in? I didn’t see any evidence of injury but I didn’t exactly do an autopsy.
I haven’t seen any evidence of mice but I’m really not eager to search my entire three story townhouse for mouse droppings. I believe the HOA did send out a notice about mice around the garbage cans about a year or two ago but I never saw any.
Do I need to call an exterminator? Would they be able to find where he got in or is it futile when I live in an area that does have rabbits and deer and presumably mice around? Do I need to have my home checked for toxic gases? Do I need to adopt more cats? I really don’t want to have to sell my house and move. Any advice?
Exterminators are ridiculously expensive for such a simple task.
Head over to Amazon, or your local hardware store. I suggest rodent bait stations, along with bait blocks. These are child & pet safe (unless you have a pet hamster roaming free). Stations are opened with a key, or screwdriver if you lose the key. Poison bait chunks (suggest JT Eaton or Tomcat brands) fit onto spikes inside the stations (look online to get the picture). Rodent eats bait and wanders off to die. It’s unlikely you’ll come across the victims and the poison is supposed to disintegrate their inside, so no stink. Also no messy discarding of dead, mangled bodies, as when using spring type traps—not to say there isn’t a certain satisfaction in that.
You’ll save a couple hundred $
And yes, if you’ve seen one, you have more.
I recommend snap traps, baited with chocolate. The chocolate is rigid enough that they can’t gently eat it away.
When i was in college the school poisoned the mice. We had mice die in inconvenient locations. We found them by the stench, and we’d remove the rotting little bodies and dispose of them. One was inaccessible. It died on the fifth floor. After a couple of days it dropped to the 4th. Then to the third. There was no one in the room on the second floor, but we think the final decay happened there.
Glue traps are more effective than snap traps, but snap traps are a lot more humane. The mouse dies immediately.
Also, the only time I’ve seen dead mice spontaneously appear in accessible places, they’d been killed by a cat. If you remove the body, use gloves, and then wash. But i might call an exterminator to determine the cause of death.
Maybe the mouse got into the entry when somebody propped the door open. Then the mouse was trapped with no food/water and probably died. I wouldn’t be too concerned unless you start finding evidence inside your living area, which with your previous experience know what to look for.
As for baiting the snap traps with peanut butter? I have heard bits of a cotton ball work better as mice are always looking for material to build nests, plus you can “weave” it into the trigger so it will take some force (and trigger the trap) to be removed.
But dont call an exterminator. Most likely they will use a poison that when it kills a mouse, and your cats eat said dead mouse- it might kill said cat.
Yep.
No, dont use poison. Set out a few snap traps.
Right! I use peanut butter.
NEVER use poison for rodents if you have cats or dogs.
I don’t currently have any pets but I really don’t want to set snap traps. First, it doesn’t solve the problem of them getting in and second, the last time I tried it something was completely licking out all of the peanut butter without setting off the traps. Just have this vision of mice continually coming into my house and being killed and I don’t know how long I can live like that. Shouldn’t I be doing something to keep them out rather than just setting up killing stations that I have to maintain forever? As far as burning the house down, that’s only if it’s snakes.
Mice are able to get through a hole the size of a dime (ASUI, their skull bones do ot fully fuse and can flex.) So the only real way to ensure no mouse gets in is to carefully check your home’s exterior and plug any gaps. If your house has aluminum siding, I would suspect there is such a gap somewhere. Other possibilities are where cables/utilities enter.
You’ve been in this house for 22 years and have never seen a mouse before now. If I were you, I would assume I was good. (I would also, however, have a couple of snap traps on hand. Yeah, sometimes the bastards steal the PB. But if you keep at it, I’m confident you are at least SLIGHTLY smarter than a mouse! ;))
Maybe over the next weeks/months make a point of moving and looking behind any boxes you haven’t moved before, maybe looking in any rarely opened drawers. If you have a crawlspace, take a peek (and a sniff). You might find mouse droppings, or even a nest. But if you don’t see anything, you can place mouse infestation pretty low on any list of things you need to worry about.
I have found that the plastic snap traps don’t go off as easily and have had mice eat the food off them without springing the trap. The basic wooden Victor traps work the best. I have also had a lot of success using the electronic Victor traps. Yes they cost more up front but they are reusable and an electric shock seems more humane than the snaps.
Don’t use poison or glue. Poison just means they’ll die in the walls and you’ll be stuck smelling them, and glue is incredibly cruel. I have had to manually kill mice that were caught in the glue and it’s no fun. I don’t use those anymore.
I’ve never had rodents in my house (not this house, anyway), but I was having a hell of a problem with them getting into my car. Once they found their way in, they’d leave scent trails for their buddies.
I started using them in mid-May. By mid-August, they had trapped and cleanly killed 23 mice. I haven’t had another one since. I leave the traps in the car just in case, but I think I severely reduced the population to the point that it’s no longer a problem. Bait with peanut butter.
This is what I’ve always used. I reuse the traps, too.
I’ve never tried that, but it ticks all the buttons I’m looking for, a clean fast kill in an accessible place where you will find the little corpse before it stinks.
I never had any luck with exterminators. They charge like $1000 to make an assessment and come out and put excluders/seals on every opening on the property (that they could find), then a monthly trap-checking and re-baiting service that’s like another $300/yr.
The problem diminished somewhat, but didn’t go away for 3 years until I had a driveway replaced, and presumably somehow that sealed an entry that the exterminators missed.
So I’m not sure I’d recommend a rat-catcher, but at the very minimum, make sure all of your food and garbage is tightly sealed. Our rats were into huge bags of dog food before we knew what was happening, and that helped them get firmly entrenched.
Plain old board-style snap traps are hard to beat. I have had luck with all kinds of bait: grapes (impaled on the little snaggy bit of the trigger) and peanut butter (not together) work well. On the rare occasion that the mice/rats seem to be careful enough to take all the bait without triggering the trap, I take a short length of cotton string an tie it to the trigger, then tie a bunch of overhand knots in it so I have kind of a daisy chain on the trigger. Then I drip bacon grease on it, enough to soak the string. The mice/rats will lick as much as they can, then start chewing on the string.
Glue boards are not only unnecessarily cruel, they can get messy. The little critters may gnaw off whatever body part is stuck to the board and leave a bloody trail into your walls or under your house. Or they may flail around enough that the board sticks to something you don’t want an industrial adhesive sticking to, like the cashmere sweater that’s draped on the drying rack in the laundry room.
One last word about exterminators: remember that they count on repeat business. They have incentive to solve your problem for now but not forever.
If you must kill them, snap traps are hard to beat, but they must be baited correctly, and tested for hair-trigger action. Glue traps work, but are cruel, and you end up with a live mouse that you need to kill. I use live traps - the ones where the mouse can wander in, but are then trapped by a tilting door. I caught 3 mice in as may days. I release them a couple of miles away.
Well this is discouraging. It seems that there is no way to prevent them getting in and the only solution is to live with constant traps all over the house. I have three floors. I wouldn’t even know how to start considering how many I would need or where to put them.
Meanwhile, I still am bothered by the fact that this mouse was dead. I can’t see a dying mouse deciding to wander into a house and climb to the second floor to die in an exposed place. It didn’t look like was injured. I don’t have poison around. He didn’t look that old. I guess he could have had a congenital cardiac condition and the exertion of climbing the stairs killed him but in that case why wander down three stairs to die on a cold tile floor?
Now I made the mistake of doing some additional reading. I picked him up with a brown paper bag to avoid touching him and wrapped him up and disposed of him in a plastic bag. Now I find I was supposed to wear PPE including gloves and a mask and disinfect everything with bleach. So it looks like I’ll be getting hantavirus in a few weeks.
With all due respect, you are really overthinking things. If you didn’t touch the dead mouse, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Where we live, (35 miles outside of Boston), mice come with the territory . I do ‘mouse patrol’ every day (which consists of checking the traps and re-baiting as necessary, as well as tossing the dead mice into a bag which I take to the dump once in a while.
The goal is not to keep them out of the house, but to keep them confined to the basement. Years ago, we had them everywhere, and a guy came out and sealed up a bunch of entry points. Of course, they always find more, but the goal is to keep it to a minimum. Mice in the kitchen are unacceptable (mouse poop in the silverware drawer finally got us to call the exterminator guy). If your problem isn’t that severe, then things aren’t so bad.
Not sure where you live, but is Hanta even a concern?
You don’t need PPE to pick up a dead mouse. Your paper bag was probably sufficient.
First…traps where food, garbage may be.
Pantries, cabinets and trash areas.
Second…learn how to fool them into getting trapped. Just changing bait choices may work. If peanut butter doesn’t work try bits of tough bacon rind wired down or lard smeared thinly so they hang around licking and getting whapped.
Third…hope a escapee doesn’t take too many pee breaks to leave a calling card to his brethren.
You’ll be ok. I’m 99% sure. Unless of course one has fleas with disease.
kidding)!!