Posted on 03/07/2020 10:15:00 AM PST by Mr Ramsbotham
At some point in mid-January, a mouse found his way into my house. This isn't an unusual occurrence. Over the past ten years I've dealt with mice on at least five occasions, including one in which an entire family set up housekeeping behind the kitchen counters. So I know a thing or two about catching mice. Namely, you spot one, set a trap, and wait for the inevitable. It never fails, or so I thought.
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
I want that....for our barn :)
I could write a paragraph on “Mouse hunting with the mighty .44 magnum!”
Made mother happy!
Root beer, they can not belch.
Every mouse we've ever had in the house (thankfully not too many) has been spotted initially by my wife. That's because she sits in the family room reading, perfectly still. They have no idea she's there. Give her a .44 and she could probably score one or two.
I don’t know about you but I get hav-a-heart traps bait with peanut butter and let them go outside. Why do you need to kill them? We had quite a few at one time because the cat brought them in alive through the cat door. Two hav-a-heart traps and we had them all gone in a week or so & they didn’t come back.
We use Tom Cat bait blocks, they work like a charm. They also come with a bait holder so that kids or other larger animals can get to it. They do smell quite nice.
Check the video. I know it's a bit long, but there's a narrative with it, and the mouse really is unique in its ability to avoid being caught. I tried bait blocks, once in a small bait station, and once in a bait station I made by myself with a piece of four-way PVC connector. I tried the bait chunks by themselves, and in a combination I call "mouse bane." He simply wouldn't take them.
Check the video. I tried the live trap and he positively refused to go inside far enough to spring it. As I noted in the narration, I would have been happy to catch him and release him, but he wouldn't have it that way, so it was total war. Cute as the bastard was, he was a filthy rodent, and there was no alternative to getting him out of my house in any way I could!
We had 4 cats AND a mouse one time.
I found the traditional Victor traps with the metal bait holder were best. I tried a number of baits and found that while American cheese would attract them, and occasionally catch them, it was also the bait they could also work loose without springing the trap. Gumdrops did not impress them. I finally found the optimum bait to be tootsie rolls. I would chew them until they got soft and gooey, then wrap a little around the bait holder. The tootsie roll would harden and the mice would have to work hard to get it off, tripping the trap virtually 100% of the time.
Use a piece of bacon tied to the trigger of a trap with string.
There are some poisons that a dog can eat 10 pounds of it with being killed.
You can’t beat the old-style Victor traps. I used a teeny bit of peanut butter with an almond slice glued to the bait holder. I knew that once I set those traps out I’d get him. The first night he just ran around them and made some half-hearted grabs, but next night he was complacent enough to try and get the bait. Even so, he almost eluded the trap bar; it caught him right at the middle of the nose (see the video, near the end). Not a pleasant death for him, but that’s what he got for being so cautious!
I probably would have ended up doing that if I hadn’t got lucky. But my next trick was the salad-oil-in-the-glass-bowl gig. But I doubt he would have climbed the ramp to get there.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t fix their access points. Any hole a mouse can get through, a snake can as well.
All of my baits were glued to the bait holders on the traps. You can see from the video that I used several types of snap trap. This guy just wouldn’t touch the bait ... even though you can tell he was desperate to get it!
until he got a bit too complacent and went to meet his maker.
As happens to us all.
I’ve found that glue traps work better than anything else. And unlike snap traps, which only work once each time, if they work at all, I’ve caught as many as four mice on just one glue trap.
If you just release them, they'll either come back in or will become someone else's problem. They're vermin and need to be killed.
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