Plus with poison they sometimes go outside to die and get caught and eaten by the local wildlife first. So the hawk or fox or cat ends up getting poisoned, too. So I second the something that’s not poison recommendation.
Jayne ,'The Train Job'
Natter 77: I miss my friends. I miss my enemies. I miss the people I talked to every day.
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, butt kicking, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
I'm a bad citizen of earth when it comes to mice. If there's one mouse, there are two. Baby mice reach sexual maturity in a couple of months. Mice gestate in a matter of weeks. An adult female can have up to 10 litters a year. A little mouse problem quickly becomes a big mouse problem. If you can swing it, I would call an exterminator.
Evidently my parents' mean old lady cat *was* doing something because when she passed away last month the mice showed up. We have a family friend who's an exterminator and he took care of the problem for them, thank goodness.
Mice are nature's protein - they are meant to be predated but too many humans and too much human stuff have shifted the playing field. It's not being a bad citizen of earth to exterminate them from your house.
We use snap traps with peanut butter - the traps are far more humane so I don't have a total meltdown when disposing of the body. We do have a cat, but the one time a mouse got into the house, the cat was like NOPE and headed to the top of the fridge.
Seconding snap traps with peanut butter. If you're squeamish (like me), there are covered snap traps (basically a snap trap in a box) so you don't actually have to see the dead mouse once they've done their job.
3 week stay-at-home starts tonight at midnight for my county. This is a relief, at this point, although it's triggered by ICU capacity thresholds which is troubling to think about. I may have to actually go grocery shopping rather than overuse DoorDash but that's the most impact it will have on my current lifestyle, I think.
Chiming in to agree with the recommendation of snap traps baited with peanut butter. My sister had glue traps in her basement, but her (elderly, fat, one-eyed) cat got caught. They got her loose, but she had glue on her paws, so walking was an issue. She ended up calling an emergency number, having to pay, and was told to use vegetable oil to remove the glue.
We do have a cat, but the one time a mouse got into the house, the cat was like NOPE and headed to the top of the fridge.
Ha, ha! Yeah, I don't think my two cats would know what to do (they are fully indoor, and we live on the third floor of a well-maintained apartment building - they've never seen a mouse that isn't stuffed and requiring them to animate it at all.)
Fourthing or fifthing the peanut butter snap trap rec. When we lived in South Philly a couple years ago, we had a mouse issue. Mice. Our little fuckers were picky - we had to try things other than peanut butter at one point. I do not miss mice one bit.
We've had a mouse issue in our office which, considering that one woman has a real phobia about mice, is a problem. The pest control guys come in to check the place the mice seemed to be using as a home base and we've been mouse free for a while. The placed snap traps with the plastic "cheese" for bait around the office, but I don't think they ever caught anything. They liked the area under the office kitchen sink, but the guy with the drawer full of food might have been an attraction.
The kitty that wandered into the bar while M was doing some maintenance work that we subsequently adopted (Taboo) earned her keep the winter Peanut was a newborn. We got mice for the first time ever, and Taboo turned out to be one of the best mousers I've ever seen. She was very proud of herself.
Long-distance hugs to everyone who wants them.