May I suggest that this is the time for you to consider investing in one of my line of autonomous pest control units - simply bring them into your dwelling, keep them properly maintained, and their simple presence and pre-installed routines are enough to keep most pests out of the house and away from your gardens, too. (Note: You have to go for the indoor/outdoor units for the garden protection.)
Not only that, but my autonomous pest control units are all-natural, 100% biodegradable, have mental health benefits for the owners, reduce stress and blood pressure levels in the owners, and the larger indoor/outdoor models even act as effective theft and break-in deterrents as well.
Of course some of them are noted for their loud operating noises, but you can’t have everything.
I tried. I bought several of these and they didn’t work – I mentioned this. My family has purchased humane traps before, but never had much success getting them to work.
I understand some of you will feel bad for the mice, but no, there is no place to release them. I read about them and you have to release them a mile away to make sure they can’t return. The property isn’t that large, and there is no place for quite some distance that wouldn’t be close to someone else’s property or residence. Given how cold it is here, they’re going to make a beeline for human residences or likely die. I am also not going to commit to a cat at this point – I’m sorry, but I am moving into an apartment and spend lots of hours of work. I don’t want to get a cat because I feel I would neglect it by lack of my presence and attention. Besides, most cats aren’t natural mousers (that I’ve had, anyway) in captivity.
I purchased some rat poison, which kills them over days (according to the packaging). Would this have been preferable? I chose not to do this because I wanted to handle things quickly and didn’t want mouse corpses popping up anywhere.
I notice nobody was crying many tears over the ants or the ladybugs. I’m sorry, I am compassionate toward pets or animals in the wild, but vermin in my residence that are vectors for disease and filthy don’t get the same respect. Otto, you obviously think I’m scum, but I don’t feel I’ve acted out of unnecessary cruelty. I acted only to solve the situation quickly. It’s not as if I shoved hot pins into their little mouse bodies for pleasure, people.
It’s easy to criticze, but I suspect many of you wouldn’t be quite as concerned as much about the mice if it was your house and you were faced with them. I understand mice are cute, and I feel bad for them, but what do you really want me to do? I could toss some of the mice poison bait in there too so they wouldn’t starve, but given they’re likely to asphyxiate anyway, what’s the point? I’m willing to take suggestions for the sake of future mice – as I said, I’m not really happy about having to do this either.
Well, your original post was amazingly intolerant, but it is true that glue traps are one of the less humane ways of getting rid of mice. Unfortunately, live traps have disadvantages. If you don’t check the live trap religiously, the mice can perish inside it. If you release the mice anywhere near the house, they’ll just come back. And there may actually be local laws that prohibit relocating wildlife.
The best traps I’ve found are the reusable snap traps with the handle that allows you to release and reset the spring without touching the corpse.
Any mice that make it past the Kitty Perimeter of Death and violate the sanctity of my humble abode have several snappy victor traps awaiting them. No guilt, no sorrow. I’m a laid-back and reasonable guy, but taking a dump in my Skippy just crosses the friggin line.
Methinks your only mistake fluiddruid was the hasty disposal. Should have put the little bugger outside in plain view, as a warning to the others. Instead of Vlad the Impaler, you could be Fluiddruid the Sticky.
I get one, maybe two, mice a year. Minx never did figure out she’s supposed to kill them (which I am happy about) she plays with them and bats them around and mostly scares the living heck out of them. When she gets distracted they make a beeline for the heating duct (which is how they get up from the basement) and we don’t hear from our fuzzy li’l friends for another year.
fluiddruid, I don’t really know you but I have a feeling that you’re not getting up in the morning thinking “WooHoo, I get to glue mice today” But, if you have to use the glue traps it would be more humane to kill the little guys right off then to just let them die slowly in the garbage bag. However, since I know I could never bring myself to do that I certainly can’t tell you that you have to. Well, it seems that this post was completely pointless and no help whatsoever. I’m sorry. I hope for your sake that they saw what happened to the others and have moved on…
When my sister and brother-in-law moved to The Island, their house became infesyed with ladybugs every winter. They built a new house a couple of miles away and the very first winter, there were the ladybugs. And hornets! They just let them do their buggy thing. The hornets died off not long into the winter and the ladybugs hung out until spring. Of course, they didn’t have kids to worry about back then.
They did have two cats though. The Siamese wasn’t much of an outdoor cat but the Maine Coon often brought little offerings to the kitchen door. She was one heck of a hunter!
We did the glue trap thing in a previous apartment…my ex wanted to just toss em away, but I made him kill them first, I think it’s awful to let them die a slow agonizing death of starvation.
They really will chew limbs off if they can in an effort to get away, we found one who’d gnawed off an entire front leg before we checked the trap. Talk about a mess.
Might I recommend putting the trap in a Ziploc bag, smashing it with something very heavy and then disposing of the Ziplocked mousie? At least that way they don’t suffer. My ex did lighting work and had one of those mega-heavy “briefcases” made of wood to carry some of his equipment in that worked quite effectively in the smashing part of the disposal.
I worked with a guy who told me about his roommate in college. Roomie was a very fastidious person who insisted upon a spotless kitchen. He was mortifies to find that they had mice. His trap campaign was successful… except for one mouse that refuced to be caught.
After failing several times with snap traps, Roomie the Engineering Student designed a better mouse trap. He put a metal screen on the kitchen floor. He procured the biggest industrial capacitor that he could reasonably lay his hands on. He got a 12v car battery and some wire. He hooked a wire to one terminal on the capacitor and to the wire screen. The other capacitor wire got a wire that ran up to the overhead and dropped down to a few inches above the centre of the screen. That wire had a piece of cheese on its end. He charged the capacitor with the battery and went to bed.
There was a loud pop during the night, but he didn’t get up to investigate. When he got up in the morning, there was mouse all over his once-spotless kitchen. And it had dried somewhat in the several hours it had been there.
(Incidentally, my former co-worker also liked to experiment. When he was a teenager he would mix up some nitroglycerine, put it into small glass phials, and freeze it into ice cubes. He’d wait for a very hot day and lay the nitro-containing ice cubes at intervals along the asphalt road, and wait…)
Get a bucket. A drywall bucket works well, but any bucket about 2 feet high and about a foot across will work. Drill two small holes in the top rim of the bucket, directly across from each other.
Unbend a wire clothes hanger until it’s straight. Take an aluminum can and drill a small hole in the bottom. String the straight wire clothes hanger through one hold in your bucket, then through the can, then through the other hole.
Put a few inches of water in bottom of bucket.
Put some peanut butter on the can. Make sure can spins easily on the wire.
Put an old yardstick or a 2x4 or a long stick up the side of the bucket. Put peanut butter on stick. Go play Morrowind.
Mouseys come to bucket, notice nice peanut-butter covered ladder leading up bucket. They climb up the ladder. They notice MORE peanut butter on can in middle of bucket. Hmmm… it looks stable. Mouseys jump to can. Can spins. Mouseys drop into water. Soon enough, mouseys drown.
It works, it’s cheap, and although death isn’t instant I’m willing to bet it’s more humane than glue traps. It also gets many mice at a time. It’s easy to dispose of - just take bucket out back and dump out water and mouse corpses.
The asian lady beetles are a nuisance. They smell, and they bite, and they stain, and they come in huge swarms when harvesting kicks them all off the soybean plants they had been living on. I’m sure the soybean aphids are well controlled, but it’s a pain to have to vacuum up thousands of dead or hibernating bugs because they like warm houses.
Plant some soybeans in your garden next year, and don’t cut them down until the following spring. You’ll keep a healthy crop of the little Harmonia axyridis punks.
