Just one mouse?
We trap over a half dozen every fall and winter. Even after getting a company to seal up crevices and other possible entry points outdoors earlier this year*, I’ve still had to dispose of the usual number of rodent corpses this winter.
*Mrs. J. demanded I do something, after I reported having to remove a snake in the kitchen. It was apparently attracted to the mice. Mrs. J. is not a fan of snakes, to put it mildly. Having one in the kitchen was a reptile too far.
Mouse traps are super cheap. So is an old bucket. Try to stay on top of it or they’ll overrun you.
Looks like the right thread to me.
I use glue traps. They are the most effective for small mice.
Euthanize the poor guy. Don’t put him in the garbage can alive. That’s cruel
What do you do to euthanize them after they get stuck in the glue trap?
I have a short piece of board.
It only takes a tap on the head.
I would never want any critter to linger and suffer.
It’s not safe to catch and release mice. They have fleas and disease. They bite.
A spring mouse trap hits them much harder than I do with the edge of a board.
Glue traps don’t work with big rats.
I found a big clump of hair on the trap.
I have a bald rat that wants to hurt me now.
LOL
Little aceplace foo foo
I don’t wanna see you
Scoopin’ up the field mice
And boppin’ em on the head!
Mice carry all manner of exotic diseases and, while I’m generally a live-and-let-live kind of guy, I have no patience for mice in my house. Even if these critters were squeaky clean they have a proclivity for chewing through home wiring and eating human food. That’s crossing a clear line in my book.
Your classic snap mouse traps are dirt cheap: I see a 12-pack available for $8 on Temu right now. Bait them with a mix of crunchy peanut butter and uncooked rolled oats and you’ll have your mouse/mice caught in no time. Once dispatched you can throw the mouse carcass and trap into the trash.
We have had mouse infestations in various houses we’ve lived in on the past (as well as rats… :shudder:) and the above bait recipie coupled with the classic snap trap always worked liked gangbusters. Now we have 4 feline overlords and our rodent invaders are a thing of the past.
The fact that you are a sublessee is mostly irrelevant. Yes, the slob downstairs and/or the owner should be dealing with the problem but slobs will be slobs and cheap landlords will always be cheap landlords, so fixing the problem is on you. Having mice crawling all over your room and spreading plague is reason enough to take matters into your own hands. Order a case or two of the traps from Temu, get some cheap PB and oatmeal from WalMart, and go on an extermination spree. Your health – and once the little vermin start eating your food, your wallet – will thank you.
I am simply going to sit here…
… And do nothing.
Well, I’ll update the topic here and there if I see him again or have other experiences with him or others.
But I simply don’t care. I said it above, I have ceased to care about pretty much everything except keeping myself alive, so that means feeding myself and watering myself down and expelling waste…
And that’s pretty much it.
I don’t care and I can’t make myself care any more than I already do. … which is zero.
And I cannot force myself to do anything, I discovered not too long ago that my main problem is that some people can force themselves to do things even if they don’t want to do them, but I do not have this power. I do not have this talent of forcing myself to do things that I don’t care about doing. I simply cannot force myself to do it. Forcing myself to do it means I have some caring to force myself, but when I have no caring, I cannot even Force myself, forcing myself to do something becomes impossible also.
If that means I become overrun with mice so badly that they start eating me alive, so be it, I guess.
This is why I said in the OP not to give suggestions or advice. This topic merely serves as a “oh, hey, I had a new experience today” sort of topic, not a “I’m going to take action on this and need help” sort of topic.
Alrighty then.
I’m out.
That is not how attrition works in my book, but you do you.
Keep us up to date if there is a new development, will you? I’ll leave this thread on “Watching”.
This.
I have cats. And when mice get into my food i trap them. (With snap traps baited with a little chocolate. I remove the dead mouse and the chocolate and keep the trap for the next time i need it.) But other than soiling your food, they aren’t all that problematic. They may also chew small holes in the walls, but that’s the landlord’s problem.
I admire your candor.
Post retirement I’m enjoying a bout of “I don’ wanna and you can’t make me” about many things. Truth be told, that attitude can only last so long before it resembles nothing so much as chronic depression. Whether it technically is or isn’t is beside the point; the practical outcome is the same.
I’m fixing my challenges in that department now. Because not-acting-depressed me has a lot more fun; mere ennui-filled existence is a boring waste of precious time.
You do you, and good luck in whatever you do.
There is a Mouse in This House
Maybe it wants to share some green eggs and ham with you.
A little generic wisdom, in hopes that it helps you in your somewhat passive approach to this situation:
A few years ago my cat was apparently fascinated by something under my couch. He kept trying to reach under it with one paw. A day or two later I came out of my office into the living room and found him guarding the body of a dead mouse. It didn’t look like he had tried to eat it, and I’m not sure what he thought I was supposed to do with it. I picked it up with a paper towel and tossed it into the back yard, with him watching me.
Long ago, I saw evidence of mice getting into my basement. I learned never to put spring traps in out-of-the-way places, because they still trapped mice, but sometimes the doomed mouse would drag the trap somewhere, and I couldn’t stop the eventual smell if I couldn’t find the source.
I’d much rather prevent them from coming in the house than kill them – they can do an immense amount of damage – so first, I tried to find all the places that they used to enter. Mice can squeeze through incredibly small cracks and holes, so I checked the outside of the house carefully, even using a small mirror to peer under the siding where I couldn’t view directly. Couldn’t find any obvious entry places.
I engaged the services of a rodent exterminator, whose only game plan was to poison everything that moved. Not a good idea; I’m a nature-lover, up to a point, and didn’t want to poison foxes, birds, or neighbor’s dogs who got loose.
Then I surmised that there was only one interior crack that they used to gain entry to the basement. For the last few years, I have been putting multiple spring traps next to that spot. I catch 20-40 per season (my “mouse season” is from September to September, mostly in the winter, when they are seeking warmth).
Mouse carcasses may be useless to me, but a tasty snack for foxes and some birds (blue jays, crows), so I put the corpses on my rock wall. Perhaps they would have liked some ketchup or salsa with their meal, but I do have my limits.
After training video cameras on the “fox feeder” for hours, I have determined that they are indeed snatched up by the birds and foxes (birds in the daytime, foxes at night). I’m happy to help the local ecology this way. And my basement (and house) are quite free of micely destruction and tiny turds. A good solution all around.
There were mice in my previous house, which was near a large forested green space that hosted, among other things, raccoons and field mice.
The mice seemed to have taken up residence in the wall behind the stove, and I first knew they were there when I heard one scrabbling over some walnuts that were in the drawer at the bottom of the stove.
They didn’t really venture into the house much as far as I could tell, and definitely never got into any foodstuffs in the pantry, at least as far as I could tell.
I dealt with them by placing a spring trap baited with cheese or peanut butter in the space between the stove and the cabinet. I’d get one every week or so and throw it out and replace the trap. And so life went on.
The funny thing was that when I moved to the new house, glad to be rid of the mice, I noticed little black pellets on the bottom of the cupboard below the sink that Google confirmed were definitely mouse poop. So again I set spring traps. Got two. And then no more. It’s been many years. What makes it funny is that I’m sure that the two mousies – who might have been in a romantic relationship – traveled to the new house from the old one in one of the moving boxes, likely one of the ones from the basement.
I’ve never had that problem. I’ve always found the mouse with a broken neck exactly where i placed the trap. That’s one of the things i like about snap traps, they kill quickly. They don’t torture the animal like a glue trap.
In rare cases, a mouse might get caught by only a tail or a paw, which is not life-threatening at first. They can crawl quite a ways, dragging the trap along with them. In the rarest case I ever saw, a half-caught mouse fell down multiple stairsteps and went several feet before I saw it. Later, both trap and mouse disappeared and I still haven’t found either.