Post Punk Kitchen Forum

So, this morning, I'm chopping peaches and singing songs and enjoying having the boy and the roommate out of town so the loveshack is all mine and I can be as ridiculous as I want and then A TINY BROWN MOUSE RUNS UNDER MY STOVE. I try to lure him with peanut butter and silence, but he disappears. I inspect our pantry and where the day before there was no poop, today there is poop. I clean, I discard, I buy some humane traps.

I need some reassurance. Will this mouse be smart / stupid enough to crawl in the live trap, eat some peanut butter, and be set free in a nice park? My landlord won't send an exterminator, so I'm on my own here. He's cute, but he carries disease and wants to eat all of our granola, so he has to go.

Help. I don't want to give into the prevailing argument that the only mouse trap worth using is a snap trap. I've always been able to trap the occasional stray critter in a coffee can and set them free, and I'm not about to start the slaughter on something so tiny, even though I'm sure I'm more afraid of it than it is of me.

Yeah, mice are dumb and curious and if you leave a trap with peanut butter it'll probably run straight in.

Make sure you release them far from your house, though, or they'll just come right back. We cycled the same couple of mice through a mouse catcher a good dozen or so times, I think, because it was too snowy to walk very far with them and there weren't other good places for them to go.

This works like a champ and I always recommend it

http://lifehacker.com/5451065/make-a-di ... paper-roll

The live traps only work if you check them every 8-12 hours (so the mice don't die of dehydration) and if you leave near an area where you can release the mice. Particularly the first criterion, otherwise it really isn't humane at all. If you just put them outside, they will just come back in. You also need to figure out where they are getting into your house and/or cupboards and mouseproofing wherever possible, or they will just keep coming back. If you have seen one, there are probably more.

If you do eventually decide to go with snap traps, I would recommend the Jawz plastic mouse traps. They are much easier to use, and "humane" in that at least they kill the mice very quickly. Again, I only recommend lethal means if the alternatives aren't working, and you do need to go around and plug up any little hole they might be getting in with steel wool, etc. Otherwise there will be no end to the carnage. :(

The problem is that I basically live in the middle of a park in the middle of a very urban area. Our house is really old and in terrible disrepair. They could be coming in from ANYWHERE. Really, I live in a shack. I've never seen one before though, because we're really uptight about how we clean and store food, so our house isn't that appealing. I only found very little poop in the cabinet, so I'm hoping he/she hasn't been here long :( I've been checking the traps, I don't want it to die a slow painful death and I live close enough, but also far away enough from a big park where it can be deposited. It's just gross to have poop in your pantry and they carry SO many diseases here...

I like the toilet roll idea. I'm just trying to be really quiet so it feels comfy enough to explore the peanut butter tunnels!

I was going to suggest the same thing. This worked for a friend of mine!

You've got to release them a mile or more away or they'll come back and remember how to get in! Sounds like a long way but they remember where the food is.

Another supporter of the peanut butter traps and the homemade loo roll trap. Just don't do what my dad did and get the mouse out of the bin to show your daughter as they can jump and run quickly! My parents did get some strange looks with emptying their bin in the countryside too.

Oh, speaking of diseases, if it's likely to be a deer mouse, I'd definitely recommend lethal means, sadly. Their droppings carry hantavirus, and they poop a lot in the live traps because they become scared and anxious. http://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/rodents/

Also, don't vacuum the droppings -- spray them with a disinfectant and wipe them up. Vacuuming or disturbing the dry droppings can aerosolize the virus. http://www.cdc.gov/rodents/cleaning/index.html

I caught it! (I hope it's the only one.) I set it free in the park, but now I'm horrified that driving with the trap wrapped in a garbage bag out the window of my car aerosolized hanta virus and I am going to DIE.

Hah! You'll most likely survive - its not all that common.

You should definitely put out the trap again, as you likely have more than one. I have been fooled too many times to be satisfied that it was just one little guy. Any luck figuring out how they might be getting inside?

I just found mouse poo in our house last night and I vaccumed it up (after spraying it with disinfectant) and while a window was open but now I'm completely paranoid and terrified. There was no way to pick it up by hand because it was so tiny. Now I'm going to totally freak out. Le sigh.

I think we caught and released about 6 mice this past spring. The humane traps baited with PB def work! The best thing to do though is to figure out how they are getting in. In our case there was a crack in our front steps at the foundation of the house. So we had to seal that up. Since catching all of them and sealing the crack we have been mouse free.

The only thing that stinks about the humane traps is that you have to remember to check them often! We always know when we have a mouse either in the house or caught though cause the cats go bonkers.

I've been having a mouse problem since there was construction on my block a few months ago. I went to OSH and the only live-catch trap they had was the "Tin Cat". That thing super works! The first time I used it I put it in the area I thought they normally come from, baited it with almonds, then went to sleep. I woke up like 30 minutes later to scratching noises coming from the trap.

Whenever I catch one, I release it in a really nice regional park about 5 miles away in the same spot where I released the others, in my silly hopes that they'll reunite. So far I've released 4.

Unfortunately I can't really find exactly where they're coming in because I live in an old house that has cracks and stuff all over. The house also has a non-level basement door that opens onto the street (so there's a gap under the door for a mouse to squeeze through)... Because of that, I don't think I'll be able to keep the mice away forever but they seem to be gone, I think/hope. I haven't seen or heard any in a while, but that trap is still there filled with almonds with no other food sitting out in the kitchen.

Keeping things clean in the kitchen DEFINITELY helps.

I'm pretty sure I don't have a mouse problem in my house, but with six cats, I'll probably never know.