I have a mouse (?) running around in my apartment. Suggestions?

I don’t care about catch and release stuff. A little glue tray with peanut butter in the middle will do it.

I had a mouse that lived in the wall of my closet. It chewed a tiny hole in the wall. We were cool. I’m a slob and left dishes around so it would scavenge at night.

Eventually I started leaving Doritos for it near the hole. It was happy, I was happy. It started being comfortable walking around my room. Mice are cute.

My roommate didn’t know about my fondness for mice. He put those nasty neck-breaking traps in the kitchen.

That was a lot of typing and I didn’t answer the question.

@Zen, what’s a “glue tray”? Is it humane?

@johnpowell, you sound like me—if he (or she) isn’t bothering me, why would I kill it?

@evegrimm Nope. Sorry. But a cat will thank you, and the circle of life…

Also, will/do they eat wool or other animal fibers?

(Basically, what are they going to eat up?)

Great question, I just read the entire ferret thread and was wondering if I ever could own an animal that feeds on live mice. Somehow I felt I would have a hard time killing these small critters, yet as soon as I read this thread I just thought to myself kill the darn thing before it becomes a problem.

I had a small mouse last year and it pooped all over the place, it chewed on bags of flour and pasta and pissed all over the place. I decided to kill it before it would turn into a bigger problem (spreading decease, or worse breeding).

First I had to put all the edible stuff in plastic containers to turn of his food supply. After that I just placed 2 mouse traps with cheese in it, and the next day, clamp! I don’t like the poison, because you don’t get kill confirmation and if it dies you don’t know where (leaving a nice rotting cadaver in your house).

I think they’re cute, I like them but they are difficult to housebreak, they leave these little mouse poops everywhere.

I would give it a chance, see if you can live with it, if you can’t, tramp on it, fast and more merciful than traps which tend to be slow and painful.

Do you have any friends with a cat? Just borrow the cat for a few days. Problem solved.

@rooeytoo these standard traps are not inhumane at all, the mouse will never know what hit him (if there is an afterlife for mice that is).

@Buttonstc Cats are great but a cat won’t reach the small corners in your storage closets. If you have mice running around outside of those you probably have a bigger problem than 1 mouse.

@evegrimm They don’t eat that stuff, they chew through it to get around in your house. Basically they nibble on everything till they find something they like. This 1 mouse I had nibbled on everything from coffee to rice, pasta, flour, toilet paper, it will even eat poison if you put it out.

@markyy – I have seen too many mice caught in that kind of trap, only instead of the neck snap they catch a leg. I have seen them chew the leg off and then limp off and die anyhow. Nope I go with the good old stomp with a heavy shoe, that is the quick, humane way.

The cat may not catch the mouse, but if the mouse had an ounce of brains, he will vacate the premises.

And the lingering smell of cat will discourage any others of his ilk.

When I lived in the city a while ago there was a nearby building which burned down so that left a bunch of mice looking for new homes. My cat only had to spend a night chasing one of them all over the apt. for word to get around in the mouse community.

Others in the building who were catless spent the rest of the year dealing with the surplus mouse population. Mine was mouse free. Coincidence? I hardly think so.

@Rooey

You must have fantastic reflexes that you can succeed with killing mice like that. Even in my younger days I doubt I could have pulled it off without breaking my own neck :)

Or are Aussie mice just much slower than average?

:D

@Buttonstc Lurve for: word to get around in the mouse community.

Nobody liked the glue tray with PB in the middle idea? Worked for me.

If you have one you have many , find the hole it / they came in and board it up wire polly filla .
Bait down kill it , bait in the gap also .

I don’t like the glue traps because they don’t kill the mouse, just get the mouse good and stuck. You then have a live mouse to dispose of. Sometimes they will try to get free by chewing on themselves. I know glue traps work, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to use them.

Regular mouse traps worked best for us. They are quick, and I’ve never had a mouse suffer in one. Once I tried some other kind of trap that didn’t use bait. You put it along an area where the mouse typically runs, and when the mouse goes through, it clamps down. Once I was horrified to find the trap had closed on the back half of the mouse’s legs. It was alive, and had dragged the trap halfway across the house. I felt so bad, and never used those again. Stick with the old-fashioned traps and a bit of peanut butter.

The catch-and-release traps work really well too, but you have to release the mouse far from your home or it will just come back. You can’t plop it into the back yard.

Where there is one mouse, there are usually more. They breed quickly and, besides the health hazard of droppings and fleas, they can do quite a bit of damage. We had a mouse problem once and were using the catch-and-release traps. There were too many mice though (we’d just bought this house not knowing the mice were included). One day, I went down to the basement and found a big puddle in the laundry room. The mice had chewed through the drain hose from the dishwasher, so whenever we ran the dishwasher water poured onto the basement floor. After that, we got a kind of poison that makes the mice very thirsty before they die. They go outside to find water and expire. It worked—no more mice, and we never had any hint of a mouse corpse somewhere in the walls.

As for cats, they aren’t always a deterrent for mice. I grew up in the country, and our multiple cats didn’t seem to scare the mice. Most of our cats weren’t “mousers” and typically only caught mice that had already been caught in a mousetrap. My inlaws got a cat to combat their mouse problem. One day my father in law saw a mouse in the bathroom. He put the can in the bathroom and shut the door. A while later, he peeked into the bathroom and saw the cat and mouse just staring at each other. After that he bought some traps.

@MissAusten Now that’s a cute image. Cat and mouse having a stare-off.

We’ve used the glue traps here, but I also don’t like them. Besides, if it’s a rat, I’ve heard that they’re smart enough to avoid the glue traps. I suppose you could always get a ferret.

OK

Mice are rodents. Rodents will chew on wiring. chewed wiring equals house fire. They also shit and pee everywhere. The disease infested little critters are NOT Stuart Little. They are not endangered, and they spread disease. At least scorpions don’t carry any diseases that I know of.

If your landlord finds out you are harboring mice, that could be grounds for eviction. Trap the little bastard and be done with it. Life is NOT a Disney cartoon.

Feral rats are even worse. Get a big rat trap. Smear it with peanut butter. While they are killing traps, they are humane, in that they kill instantly. Poison on the other hand, takes a few days.

I had a mouse problem that soon turned into mice problem rather quickly. It started in my livingroom I believe due to my rather messy african grey parrot. I tried the regular mouse trap with cheese and that didn’t work! Mice do not like cheese. That is an old wives-tale. I then purchase those sticky things, now those caught one but…. Terribly messy!!!! It was panting because it had struggled for who knows how long and was half off of the tray. The point is it worked. If you are going to use regular traps bait it with a mixture of bacon and peanutbutter. No Cheese!!! Mice will in fact shred clothing any type of clothing.
Not all cats are mousers! My two are not and should they be, they get fed daily! Good luck!

I am so with @evelyns_pet_zebra on this. Just saying.

Glue trap baited with a peanut in the middle.

Once caught, stick the trap to the head of a hammer and put in a water filled sink for a rather quick, poison free, silent and bloodless death.

Please don’t use chemicals, it kills wildlife that feed on poisoned rats.

Noel 5, Mice 0.

Any animal rights whackos have an issue with my methods? Ask for my address so you can come over and convince the mice to pay part of my rent.

Milo here; Gas up the Lear jet; I am packing as Gail writes.

(Before me, she used Havaharts and deposited the live mice in the fields of a couple who had been very mean to her…over five miles away is the rule.)

I personally feel glue traps are inhumane, for reasons mentioned above. The thought of the mouse chewing its foot off, or even just being stuck for hours in a blind panic, I couldn’t do it.

I had mice in one of my old apartments and we did end up living quite harmoniously together, though they did chew up all my shoelaces in the closet, ate pieces of leather off my work shoes (restaurant smells, yum), chewed the phone cord in half, and disemboweled this stuffed unicorn thing I’d had since I was a baby, to get the stuffing out. That last one was kind of a bummer, since I’d had that thing forever.

They mainly stayed in the closet, so I never did hear them or see them, but the chewed up stuff was evidence of their existence. Personally, I would go for a live trap and release it in the woods, but I’m not much for killing things just because I don’t like them or because they come within my domain.

This new Ortho trap supposedly guarantees to kill and contain the mouse. I have no personal experience with this trap, I’ve just seen the commercials for it lately.

Mice love peanut butter .

I solve the mouse self mutilation problem by puting the traps out in the open. When the mouse is caught I see it before the mouse has a chance to suffer or chew off limbs.

Thanks for the great responses, @all!

I will first talk to my landlord, before doing anything. I know, for instance, that they want to know if things like mold or bugs crop up, so I think a mouse falls under their “jurisdiction”.

If, however, they don’t do anything, I will probably go with the glue trap, as mentioned in many of the answers. (Can I find them at the local grocery store?)

Thanks again!

mix niquil with peanut butter, leave it out for the little guy, he’ll get all woozy and but he won’t pass out right there, but he’ll be slowed down enough to toss a box over him or something of that nature.

@ABoyNamedBoobs03 – now that is a unique solution, will it really work, have you tried it???

I had a mouse in my apartment a month ago, and the thing chewed its leg off, to get out of the slap trap, so i used a glue trap like what @Zen said, and it caught the mouse, but of course, I had to have my neighbor take it out. He took it to the dumpster area, so that it could still live. He used a little bit of oil to get it off the glue trap.

@rooeytoo yep, you can use a more suttle liquer too like a bourbon or the like. rodents love peanut butter, the only thing you have to be sure about is to not put so much niquil/alcohol or crushed up sleeping pills that it overpowers the peanut taste. if you give them a pretty solid helping they’ll be walking crooked and making inappropriate comments to women in no time…

@ABoyNamedBoobs03 – heheh, great mental image, thanks for the info! I’ll still feel like a murderer but at least I’ll know they’re feeling happy as they go!

Well, there’s always this method for getting rid of a mouse. When I saw the video on this blog, I was cracking up, thinking of this question!

@rooeytoo I so agree with you. I still have one mouse left (so I think) my biggest problem is I have two cats two dogs and one African grey parrot! I have to be so dang careful because one of my dogs happen to be a Dachshund and can crawl under just about everything & WILL eat EVERYTHING… that’s why it’s taking so long to rid myself of these wood chewing, clothes shredding, making holes in my floor, sneak in the dark, laughing at me and probably saying in mouse langauge “catch me if you can, B%#?!”

@sccrowell – I am surprised your daschund doesn’t catch it. I had one once who was a better mouser, no he was a rodenter, he caught anything and everything! He was a total terror, he lived with an akita, bouv and poodle, as well as assorted cats, but he ruled the roost, nobody argued with the Fritzel dog. You better give him a talking to about his duties in this world!

To keep this on topic, @evegrimm – perhaps you should adopt a daschund to catch your mouse!

@rooeytoo, I’d love to get an animal, but right now, I have no job. :(

And I plan on traveling during the summer, and my family has said (pretty emphatically) that they weren’t going to be responsible for whatever animal I get.

But I still want one! I miss having a kitty!

Stand on a chair and scream in as high a pitch as possible!

@daloon – and here I thought you were a champion of feminism! I believe that might constitute a cheap, throw away sexist remark. But I could be wrong?

There’s a trap, I’m assuming, that was placed in outside storage by apartment maintenance. Hopefully, the mouse will bother me no more. :D

Thanks for all the great answers, guys!

@daloon, mice are awesome, as are rats. But I’d rather have it in a cage, or as food for a snake, than running around my apartment, leaving presents and nibbling on things.

I probably would stand on a chair and scream if it was a scorpion. Or a black widow. One of those ginormous ones, with bodies the size of a quarter.

@rooeytoo One of the things that bothers me about my wife is that she won’t deal with mice. I have to set the traps. I have to dispose of the remains.

She’ll go to great lengths to make sure she never sees a dead or an alive mouse. She’ll tape up newspaper to the cabinets to make sure that whatever happens is out of her sight! What’s even worse, is that she has corrupted my daughter, who actually did stand on a chair in response to a mouse one evening!

Where did feminism go? How can something as silly as a mouse chase feminism into a deep, dark corner?

Anyway, I thought the toss-off line would show you me rolling my eyes. Feminism is humanism, but I still have to kill the mice! Will you raise a glass with me to cheap, throwaway remarks about life’s ironies? ;-)

@daloon: Necessity is the mother of invention. Not having a man around forces me to deal with the mice. However, they are peacefully dead on the floor. I use a dustpan and broom, and throw the corpse into the woods. Then I scrub hands and dustpan. I also don’t mind using the Havaharts and Mouse Witness Protection Program, several miles from here.

@gailcalled You are, as ever, the very model of common sense!

OKay @daloon – mutual eye rolling time.

But I still hate the stereotype, I, as Gail, managed to survive life’s mice and other trials, in a manless state for a lot of years of my life.

And I have known men who would be up on the chair bellowing for help at the sight of a mouse, spider, blood or poop. Let’s have a mutual eye roll for all those helpless ones regardless of their plumbing.

@rooeytoo You got it! [eyes rolling until I get dizzy]

Gotta run. I see mouse #35, with its little feet pointing towards the ceiling. Too bad. I thought that this one might get away.