I’ve discovered tonight that my nice little house has mice in the attic. They’ve probably been up there a year or more. The droppings are very dense in one small area, and there are the tell-tale dime-sized burrow holes in the blown insulation.
Damn it. Damn, damn, damn, damn it.
I don’t want to hurt them (and I’m aware that a lot of wags online say “oh, live traps are more cruel because when you release the mice they’ll die of exposure” … yeah, I somehow don’t see that as the most likely scenario) so I want a good live trap. Assume any reasonable amount of money is no object. Any suggestions or recommendations?
I’ve found an array of live traps, and probably the one which seems to have the best reviews is the Victor Tin Cat. However, a) many folks seem to say it’s overpriced and competitors which look the same are just as good, and b) some say they don’t work. So I guess I was wondering if folks had first-hand experience, or had some caveats in general about catching mice live.
Dunno about the “dying of exposure” bit, but I use kill traps because I have seen mice in plague, and that’s not fun for the humans, but it’s also likely not much fun for the mice. Farmers here use flamethrowers on mice in such plague proportions you can’t see the dirt, because the mice are like a carpet (that can’t be fun for the mice either).
Naah, I suspect we humans have already boosted the mouse population too much as it is. Give me a quick, fast-death “kill trap” over a live trap any day.
It’s just like the reason animal shelters put down cats and dogs. The folks that work there tend to like animals, and I do too. It’s about the long term good.
The reason the live traps have a reputation for “not working” is because the householder normally simply steps out into the back yard and releases Mousie to freedom. However, Mousie simply turns right around and goes back in the house and picks up where he left off. But the householder doesn’t “get” this, and thinks he has an unending supply of mice which the trap isn’t catching, when in actually he’s just trapping the same couple of mice over and over again.
You have to take Mousie far away–far, far away–in order to be sure that, like a pigeon, he won’t just come home again.
I don’t get it, DDG. If I was the householder in you scenario, I’d think that I had a perfectly functional mousetrap and a perfectly horrible infestation. The live trap I had that didn’t work was a failure because no mouse was dumb enough to get caught by it, not because it was always occupied.
There’s no chance whatsoever that it’s just one mouse.
I’ve had very good luck with the windup mouse traps. However it’s critically important to check them frequently, otherwise the mice die horribly. So that makes them (or any other live trap) a bit less than ideal for an attic unless you’re willing to go up there pretty much on a daily basis.
I came in there to recommend this one. I used it in my attic with great results. I just got tired of emptying dead mice (5 at a time) out of the regular traps.
Be very, very, very careful with the feces. It can carry a multitude of pathogens. Do not under any circumstances vaccuum it up.
Now, I have a cat that is actually a mouser. I used to kill upwards of 50 mice / moles a year. Now, they just don’t come in, and if they do, I don’t have to clean it up
I remember when growing up that we had a live mousetrap made by a company called “Ideal”. It was effective when it worked, but it had too many moving parts and kept breaking down. Also, sometimes you had to jiggle the little rod if the metal ball didn’t hit it hard enough after rolling down the stairs. Not recommended.
I have to say on further research, I’m dismayed at the number of folks online who say that relocating captured live mice is inhumane. Good grief, if I trap them with a kill trap, there is a 100% chance the mouse will die, possibly with great pain. If I release it live, there is less than a 100% chance the mouse will die near-term, and it might actually get on alright. And if I’m not supposed to kill them and not supposed to release them, what do I do - get a giant terrarium and make Mouse Village 2000?
My friends napalmed their attic mice infestation, and it worked, but then the bodies started decomposing, and what a smell! That had to be injurious to one’s health.
And DDG is right, once freed, the mice will beat you in a race back to the house and sneak in before the door shuts. I say kill them, really, one does not deal with an infestation by catching and releasing. You may want to hire a pro.
What about food sources? what little pile of niblets are you finding? We always found cat food where mice have played, or birdseed after they chewed through a rubbermaid bin and the thick bag the seed was stored in. :eek: I also moved my bird feeders away from the house, to keep the ground feeding critters(mice, moles, voles, squirrels and possums) away from the house too.
During a cross country move I accidentally relocated a mouse that had found it’s way into the back of my truck and made a nice little home in my shoes. I used on of these and he was caught within 6 hours.
You won’t like this --and I hate to say it, because your not wanting to hurt the mice is a really good-hearted motivation which I don’t want to disparage – but live traps aren’t worth shit when you’ve got a mice infestation; in my experience (and I have lived in some places that were serious mice-farms in my time) the little varmints just will not crawl into them. Maybe they would be effective if you were dealing with a few fieldmice that had just started refugee-ing in your country cottage, but for regular old ubiquitous mus musculus, no way.
The sad truth is that unless you have a couple of hunt-savvy kitties on hand, to deal with a mouse invasion you have to harden your heart, stifle your qualms and conscience, and prepare for mass mouse murder. Although they are living creatures that don’t mean any harm, and even kind of cute in their sneaky obnoxious way, their destructiveness, fecundity and nasty habits of living will inevitably make it necessary to decimate and devastate them, or else give them your house and all your goods. And we don’t want that, do we? Your neighbors (the ones who are not themselves mice) don’t want that either.
Start proactively by cleaning the place within an inch of its life. Put all dry foods both human and animal into glass jars or metal containers of some kind.Stuff steel wool in all the mouseholes you can actually find, and nail sheets of tin like flattened cans over them. Then lay down a half-dozen mouse traps – the classic necksnappers like Victor makes. If the invasion is real bad you may even have to use ratbaits, like D-Con. Yes, it’s terrible poisonous stuff, and you want to avoid it as much as you possibly can (especially if you’ve got dogs, or pet birds that are allowed to roam the premises freely), but sometimes three or four boxes of the ol’ Rough-On-Rats, placed strategically under sinks and behind the range, are all that will save your home from being annexed by Hamlin-town. There are some people who swear by glue traps of various styles, but personally, I think those things are just horrifically cruel and flat-out refuse to utilize them.
I find it very distressing that things between ourselves and our beastly kinfolks can sometimes come to such a pass, especially when we must contend with critters as simple and basically harmless as mice, but there you have it. Nature red in tooth and claw, and like that…
I have 42 pounds of cat in two packages, but they cannot get up into the attic. They do kill an enormous number of spiders and other things downstair, however.
The mice are limited strictly to my attic thus far; there has been no sign of them anywhere else. There are numerous holes into the attic, which means that they will all need sealing.
I thank you for your advice - however, I am going to at least try the live traps first, and if that does not work, then things will escalate very quickly.
The question I’d suggest you look into is whether it is legal for you to release trapped vermin outside your own property. I know that it’s illegal in some jurisdictions. (NYS, for one) ISTR that you’re home based in a far less urban state, but a few minutes research still seems a reasonable precaution.
The other thing to consider is that you will probably have to check the trap twice a day to make sure you’ve not killed any mice. Between their high metabolisms, and the conductivity of metal surfaces, they can either starve, or go into terminal hypothermia in many live traps, within a relatively short time frame.
