I like the paper bag idea! I briefly used plastic snap traps, which I recall were easier to set, but mice routinely made off with bait and so I stopped using them. YMMV, I may have simply chosen the wrong brand.
If you set the bait properly in the electronic trap, it will never even be disturbed by the mouse because they will die trying to reach it. You can even reuse the bait, though I don’t because I don’t want it to get moldy (actually, does peanut butter mold?)
I can understand being worried about the plates losing sensitivity after enough mice stomp across them. But that’s never happened to me, after dozens of kills. If it ever does and I have to retire it, the cost per mouse is still less than a disposable snap trap.
While I hate mice, I find the act of drowning them pretty disgusting as well. I want to catch them but how can I dispose them if not by drowning? I didn’t know that an electronic trap exists. That’s pretty brilliant actually! I must take a look at that!
I am going to set two of them them along the baseboards flanking the outside of the closet that I saw the critter run into last night. I am hoping he will venture out on his own tonight and meet his demise. I really want to poke around in the closet first, but if he’s in there he might just make a mad dash for another random part of the house. Fingers crossed I will get lucky tonight, and then if I catch one I will investigate the closet after disposal.
I totally second this, particularly since cats scare away the mice before they even become a problem. (I think it’s technically the cat urine, and I vaguely remember some parasite that had to pass through a cat (after the mouse), so it would turn off that fear in the mouse…)
OTOH, I don’t have a cat now, so I’ve been using a single live-catch trap in the kitchen of my “lovely” Brooklyn brownstone. I’ve caught three mice and just let them go in the nearby park. The landlord also put down some poison bait things, so I’ve had to clean up a number of dead mice, which are usually discovered by the smell. That sucks.
Cats are not necessarily the solution. If your cat gets fat and sassy it will catch a mouse then play with it for a while and eventually lose interest and or let it scurry away to some corner and escape.
In my experience the traditional steel-and-wood mousetrap is extremely effective, but pretty gruesome. I couldn’t imagine poison though. Disposing of a fresh corpse is bad enough, but finding a decaying one from the smell? Ugh.
Neither trap tripped overnight. I will inspect them later to see whether the mouse managed to get the bait without springing the trap. Maybe he is still hiding in the back of the closet or has gone somewhere else. I will investigate in there later with a flashlight, but I was hoping he would wander out on his own since I’d rather not spook him into some other random corner of the house.
You in the mid-west? Mice may carry Hantavirus, so kill it dead. If you see droppings, wear gloves, spray with a disinfectant and wipe it up with a paper towel, garbage everything including the traps. I’d wear a dustmask too (since I have some, not sure it’s worth a trip). Might be paranoid but it is fatal.
I’m on the east coast US, outside DC. I am planning to take precautions while handling/cleaning up, but I didn’t think basic house mice carried anything too horrible.
Our house is built in a newly developed area that used to be an open field surrounded by farmland. It’s a mouse breeding ground. We’ve never had a mouse in the house itself, but our garage has been a popular place for them to shelter at night. If it wasn’t for the poop, I probably would live and let-live.
Anyway, we used some kill trapsthat were working well. My wife got upset by the number of “cute little things” we were killing (doesn’t help that she was usually the one to hit the garage first, so she found most of the bodies). Used a $30 non-kill trap for a bit, but the damn things were super smart and, instead of going through the entrance, they chewed a hole in the side of the trap and got the bait that way.
Last year I was at Lowes and found this cheap no-kill trap that has actually worked better than the kill traps and the more expensive non-kill traps:
I have 6 of them in my garage at the moment. I keep 2 near the entrance to the garage, 2 along the back wall, and one each along the side walls. I’ve found that Tomcat’s “mouse attract” bait works far better than peanut butter or anything else has for me. Each morning I walk the garage before getting in the car for work. After a flurry of finding 1 - 3 mice per day, I’m down to one every few weeks. I walk them out to one of the open lots down the street and let them go there.
We keep fixing the entry points and they keep making new ones. Not easy keeping the little buggers out once it gets really hot or really cold outside.
Look for pictures of house mouse vs white-footed mouse (a field mouse, Peromyscus). The field mice are the ones that can carry hantavirus, though the total number of cases ever in the whole of the eastern time zone is less than 20.
I’ll never again use a snap trap after I set one at my workplace, and the next morning found the mouse with a broken back with the bar squeezing his body to nothing in that spot, still conscious and alive, with his eyes wide open and terrified, his front legs trying in vain to find something to get hold of.
Good lord, I felt horrible. Tears in my eyes, I took him out back, freed him from the trap (which of course didn’t help him a bit), and smashed him as hard as I could with a cement slab. That finally did it. But I’ll never forget it, even though it was 25 years ago or more.
Nowadays, I use those little live traps. They’ve worked every time. And yes to peanut butter.
Then I just take them out into the country and dump them out.
And yes, I know mice are a nuisance and can be a health problem. But geez. Put yourself in their place for a second. They’re just trying to get by just like everyone else. I’m really conflicted on this.
I’m a little more paranoid than you. I’m afraid they’ll find their way back, so I drive them two miles into the country, driving in a few circles on the way to get them confused.
Hahah, for some reason this just cracks me up. Do you blindfold them and play the radio really loud to disorient them?
I did the live catch traps for a bit with the rats that were getting into the chicken pen. At first I took them way up into the mountains, but then the drop off trips got shorter and shorter, until finally I just started letting them go over by the highway, about half a mile from my property. I don’t know if any of them ever came back. There’s a whole field of them behind the house, seems like!
When I lived in the midwest it was those sticky gel trays. Worked great except usually they didn’t die and you had to put them out of their misery.
If any mice actually penetrated my early warning system (in ground hot tub that is100% inescapable and apparently a very tempting target) and I needed an in home solution I think I would go with that electric shock trap linked above.
