Nuke 'em from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
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We go with live traps, here. We've got several the size of a stick of butter - and a few that hold multiple mice at a time.
Both are similar in function - stick a bit of peanut butter on a cracker at the end. Mice go in through a door that does not permit an exit. Check the traps daily. When you catch one, hand it to a child and tell them to bike to the end of the road and let them go in the woods.
On the theory that it's easier to throw a corpse in the trash than convince a child to hike a few blocks in the middle of a Wisconsin winter we've tried the kill traps. The mice never fell for them.
We have a cat but he's more a tripwire to alert us that we have a nest of mice than an effective mouse eradication system.
Thanks! I'd dimly remembered hearing that the live traps weren't very effective, so it's good to hear some contrasting information. I think we'll go with the live traps and see how we get on.
I tried one of those about 10 years ago, and the mice basically treated it as a walk-in larder: the food would disappear from inside, but the trap wouldn't trigger. Still, no harm in trying them out.
In our case, I saw a mouse run along the working surface, jump into the rubbish bin (through the flip top lid) and jump out again. After that, I made sure that the bin was completely empty (so that the surface was much lower), and waited for them to try the same trick again. I then grabbed the bin liner, bunched the top closed, and carried it down the street at arm's length. I released the mice "into the wild", by a wheely bin outside an Indian takeaway, and they seemed happy enough.
We tried a variety of brands of live traps for months in Cambridge. They were merely decorative. Eventually we gave up and got old-fashioned ones. They got rid of the (by then extremely large number of) mice in a week or two.
But it seems other people can get the humane ones to work. Clever them.
old fashioned and humane - put a sunflower oil in a bottle with a wide neck. Mouse should (theoretically) be able to climb inside, so some additional "steps" like match boxes may be necessary. It depends on your bottle. The idea is that mice climb in and cannot climb out. I haven't tried it myself, but it was my grandmother's recipe. However, we always had a mechanical one as well.
Last time we had mice in our kitchen we left them out some snacks and waited... When little rodents raised their head I caught them with a speedy grab (wearing oven mitts of course), shoved them in a box and released them into the wild... Probably not the easiest method, but it was fun.
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We go with live traps, here. We've got several the size of a stick of butter - and a few that hold multiple mice at a time.
Both are similar in function - stick a bit of peanut butter on a cracker at the end. Mice go in through a door that does not permit an exit. Check the traps daily. When you catch one, hand it to a child and tell them to bike to the end of the road and let them go in the woods.
On the theory that it's easier to throw a corpse in the trash than convince a child to hike a few blocks in the middle of a Wisconsin winter we've tried the kill traps. The mice never fell for them.
We have a cat but he's more a tripwire to alert us that we have a nest of mice than an effective mouse eradication system.
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although i would have perpended "dust off and "
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In our case, I saw a mouse run along the working surface, jump into the rubbish bin (through the flip top lid) and jump out again. After that, I made sure that the bin was completely empty (so that the surface was much lower), and waited for them to try the same trick again. I then grabbed the bin liner, bunched the top closed, and carried it down the street at arm's length. I released the mice "into the wild", by a wheely bin outside an Indian takeaway, and they seemed happy enough.
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But it seems other people can get the humane ones to work. Clever them.
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I haven't tried it myself, but it was my grandmother's recipe. However, we always had a mechanical one as well.
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