Saw a mouse in my apartment.
I live a bachelor lifestyle, so I have no food in here. Just alcohol. I hope the mouse figures that out and goes away. I should get some traps in case it doesn't. I hate killing animals but there's no practical alternative.
Mice can eat more than food. Papers, glue, anything organic. Also make sure any food wrappers are promptly disposed of. Tea and coffee grounds. Spills of juice, milk, anything like that. It doesn't take a lot.
There is never one mouse.
Cables. Don't forget cables. They sometimes go for the insulation, which could become a fire hazard.
If you get a glue trap, they're stuck, and now you have to deal with a live, suffering animal. If you get a regular mouse trap, they'll almost certainly have their necks immediately, and humanely broken before you find them. I know that's still not great, but it's the better of the options available. I know of no animal-rights person that wants rats crawling over them while they sleep...
I use the snap traps, although the last time I did that, I had to execute a few mortally wounded mice, which was not fun. So many mice were coming into my old house that I resorted to rat poison there (I don't expect things to get that bad here) but glue traps are over the line for me.
We're on the same side. I had a mouse in the 3rd floor of my first apartment building, and had to humanely put it out of its ❔mystery❓ when I finally caught it. ☹️ I haven't used a glue trap since then...
DAMN YOU, AUTOCORRECT!
Check out the electric mouse traps. Mouse walks in, there’s a snap sound, mouse is instantly dead. Worked well for me
I need to know what this means
How about a dog with a dog as a pet?
Hey man wanna borrow my cat
Even better if you know someone who has ferrets.
If you get snaptraps, get the cheap wood ones because all those other ones are trash. The wood ones have a hell of a good spring on them and they're dead RFN. And they're more sensitive than any of the plastic ones I've used.
I live in the country, running a mouse trapline is a necessity. Once you've had the dirty little fuckers set up house where you don't notice them for a few months, you will have precisely zero sympathy for their coexistence in your dwelling. I once had to clean a nest out of a breakerbox with several crisped corpses and every breaker covered in piss and shit.
There's a reason we domesticated cats.
I live in the country
When I lived in the country, I bought rat poison in bulk from the farm supply store. That was much cheaper than buying the little containers at Walmart. Warfarin has an antidote in case your pet does something stupid. (My dog never ate any but I was worried that he would.)
I'm a city boy but a guy who helped me out a lot with renovation lived there his whole life. I saw him spot a dead mouse in my house, pick it up with his bare hand, chuck it outside, and then go back to work without washing his hands. Probably not smart but it impressed me.
Get 2 medium sized boxes for moving.
Cut one of them up to make a ramp into the other box.
Put peanut butter or almond butt on the ramp and in the box.
Goto bed after drinking said alcohol.
Look in your box the next morning and your new friend will be there smiling at you.
Find them a better forever home.
That sounds a lot like what my coworker does with chipmunks. Except, it isn't a box, it's a bucket. And it isn't a forever home, it's 8" of water.
Snap traps and peanut butter are your friends. I do not know why, but they cannot resist peanut butter. I hate having to kill them and I won't unless they come inside. They are free to roam aroind in my little garden though.
Get a bucket or box and place a plank reaching into it. Glue an almond or something with peanut Butter to the end. Oil the lower half of the plank.
You might have to cover the the edges so they cant jump out.
Thats how I caught 7 mice in a day that refused to get into conventional traps for days. I released them in a field.
Act fast, they reproduce Quick and its unlikely only one mouse moved in. They will nibble on you while you sleep and such.
If you dont have food they will start eating through stuff.
I trapped one with two laminated boards in a corner, put a bucket on top and a piece of cardboard underneath. Moved it outside and it was back in half an hour. Then I brought it a few blocks away. Goodbye mouse.
Befriend him, when I was in my 20s my house had no food but all booze and we had this cool mouse live with us, we would put out some snacks for him where we knew he was getting in, he used to sit and watch tv in my housemates room with him.
He wasn't worried about us after a while and I never saw any others come in.
Mice don't go inside for food, the go in for shelter and then find food. Not having food won't make them leave. As long as you have a warm place to stay, they are going to stick around unless you help them leave.
Get a snake to take care of the mice (there's basically never just one). Once the snakes get out of hand, get a cat to handle the snake population. Then when the cats get out of hand, get a coyote to eat the cats. And when the coyotes start to take over, introduce mountain lions. If the mountain lion population spikes, well then you're fucked.
It's ok. Across the whole insect, plant, animal kingdom there are cases where cohabitation is not tolerated and often leads to one party's death. This is how things sometimes work.
Can confirm, I just about killed a college roommate once because he wouldn't do his dishes and snored like a banshee.
Get help
Live traps work pretty good. Then you get a brief visit and can release outside.
Stay clean and don’t inhale the poop or pooticulate matter.
My understanding is that if I release them outdoors here in the city, they'll go right back into someone's house. If I release them in the middle of nowhere, they'll die. A friend of mine tried keeping a captured mouse in a cage, but although he took good care of it, it always appeared to be terrified and died after a few weeks.
I'm willing to put in effort to protect animals (I've been a vegetarian for 18 years) but I think that catch-and-release mousetraps would just move the ugly part out of my sight rather than avoiding it entirely.
I hear ya. I live trapped under my sink and got like one a day for weeks and released outside (rural 100 yds from the house in tall grasses). Thought I’d scored a happy wife no longer asking me to kill the countless mice and didn’t have to kill.
I ended getting kill traps and killed maybe three, because it was the same mice just returning I’m sure via the magic animals do.
I would probably disagree with the idea that actual wild release would be a death sentence. I think mice would be just fine, or at least have a legit chance. But alas such things aren’t really feasible anyway in the city, and there’s health concerns transporting that far, and so on.
Mice don't live very long even under the best of conditions.