fpb | (no subject)

Of all the things I hate about running your own house, mouse infestations are what I hate the most. Not the mice themselves, but the means you have to use to get rid of them. I had hoped two years ago to have seen an end to it, but recently I had evidence of more visitations. A certain amount of poison feed seemed to have dealt with that. But a few days ago I heard the distinctive rustle, and today I saw with my own eyes one of the culprits in the kitchen, which is of course the last place where you want to see a mouse. Unfortunately, the way I had available to deal with the problem - left over from two years back - is the cruellest of all the traps: the glue trap. There is nothing pleasant about having to take away a tiny, desperately squealing creature, stuck in a devil's brew and mad with terror. Mice, when helpless, are very appealing. But people like me are in no position to excuse them; if the place is not made unwelcome to mice, not only is your health and food at risk, but you are in danger of opening it to rats - which is plain ruination. And yet... if I could have seen a way to keep the pathetic robber in a cage without inviting any of his mates or finding out too late that it was pregnant (at which they are very efficient), I likely enough would have kept it.

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Borrow a cat for a few days? If it doesn't catch them, it'll scare them away.

I think they are running away from the neighbourhood cats. And another thing I have tried to do is to scare the cats off. The largest and most offensive of them found his way in once when I had fallen asleep with the door open, and left smelly crap in two or three places.

I wish this was so. We have a cat who has the run of the basement and every so often he comes up with a mouse. It's obvious he is around - it's where his litter box is - yet in they come.

Also - I like your user name!

sigh...we have rats. They are a real pain to get rid of.

You may not be able to care for a cat, but they can be effective mousers when well fed.

Also, a cat is a good tripwire. When he comes up from the basement with a prize, it's time to set out traps.

They are evil little devils.

My whole office was once infested by construction nearby. I could claim the critters insulted my dignity, but I was crying too much to really care. It was a hellish few months. I would have quit, but at least at work I could surround myself with a vitual moat of traps.

I hate all rodents - rats, mice, squirrels, anything that is small and furry and moves too fast for its size. But rats are the worst. There are some in Chinatown, near the chicken-sellers, that are as big as dogs, and howl like a deamon-cat.

Use whatever you have. They only look cute when they're trapped. They are cannibals with fierce, hungry red eyes and sharp teeth that chew through your electrical wiring.

I didn't think the sticky traps were available any more. I recall, some twenty years ago, getting a tin of some evil yellow substance from a friend who worked for rent-o-kill. We spread the stuff onto a sheet of cardboard about 1m x 1m which was then placed in the middle of the kitchen floor. Then put chocolate in the centre of the sheet. The mice must have literally thrown themselves at it. We guessed that they must have been climbing onto the kitchen table and leaping towards the chocolate. Perhaps we were invaded by a family of mice with a particularly sweet tooth, but chocolate as bait was the key to catching them.

They're available in the US, in Wisconsin at least. Our facilities guys use them at work.

And we need them - our office building is in a bit of woods, next to a slough - we have a lot of wildlife in the area and some it wants very badly to live indoors.

Our local household goods and DIY shops do a brisk business in them, and in mouse traps generally, which tells you something about our part of London. The ones I use are made of rigid cardboard spread with glue on one side which folds along three lines, forming a triangular cardboard tunnel. Place it in places where the mouse has to pass and, bingo! One stuck (and terrified) mouse. On the whole, I would rather use spring traps, which kill them quick, but this lot works.

Ah, fpb! I know it is hard, but you are right. You just can't live with vermin. Also, think what they would do to your books.

Correction - what they have done. Long ago, I lived in a shared house where one day there was a genuine plague of them - apparently they had been driven out by some building works in the local school down the road. Some of my books still bear the marks of that disaster.

Maybe a dog? I know this sounds weird but it might work. Some small breeds are hunters, like dachshunds. My dachshund likes to hunt all kinds of vermin - roaches, mice, and even lizards. Though there's also the trouble of having to housetrain him.

I saw a mouse once. I put a stuffed kitten on the floor in the middle of the apartment. Bizarrely, it worked!