An Alphabet Of Things I Don’t Like: M

~ beetleypete

Mice.

Unlike wild field and harvest mice, or the mice kept in cages as pets, feral mice living inside your home is not a good thing at all.

‘While the common house mouse is not as dangerous to your health as a deer mouse, they can still spread disease, such as hantavirus, salmonellosis and listeria through their urine, droppings, saliva and nesting materials’.

As well as stealing your food and leaving disease and droppings around, they also chew electical wires, and damage conduits and plastic piping in their efforts to get around inside your house.

I have been lucky since moving to Norfolk, but when I lived in London, I had a big problem with mice in various places I lived over the years.

I tried going down the poisoning route, but that never seemed to be effective, and I certainly never found any dead mice that might have taken that blue granular bait. So I went ‘old school’, and bought a job lot of retro spring mouse-traps. The shop advised using chocolate to attract them, rather than the old fashioned lure of cheese. So I baited half a dozen traps with Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, and put them in the places I had previously know them to frequent.

Less than ten minutes later, I heard the first ‘Snap!’ This was followed by a series of snaps in quick succession as three more traps were sprung. I waited a little longer, then investigated. Sure enough, four dead mice, one in each of the four traps. They had all been killed instantly by the thin metal bar that had dropped across their neck or body. I re-baited with chocolate, and put them back.

During the evening there were more snaps, and I found five more dead mice before bedtime. Within a week, I had no more mouse activity at all.

So if you get mice in the house, use the old-style traps. They really work.

59 thoughts on “An Alphabet Of Things I Don’t Like: M”

  1. What a wonderful selfexplaining mouse trap. Lol It seems here we have a deal with the mice families. Before we had our last cat, we also had problems. But now he hasn’t been around for about five years, and there’s still no mouse to see. Maybe they have been told about the hauntings. Lol Michael…

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      1. I have to put the record straight on that one, if only because the straw bale community would never forgive me if I didn’t :), but once the plaster is on they would find it very hard to get in, and even if they did there is little food value to straw so they tend to steer clear. They would much prefer hay which still holds the seeds after harvesting, or my barn where I have over of tonne of oats to munch on 🙂

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  8. We have an ongoing problem and use the snap traps. They had become very clever at removing the peanut without the trap snapping. Now my husband glues a little peanut on each trap. SNAP! The thing I like about those traps is that they are so cheap that it is possible for me to just throw the whole thing away if he isn’t around to get rid of the mouse and reuse the trap. My daughter had a dreadful invasion of mice in New York City. One winter she phoned us screaming that she had just put her hand into her winter coat pocket and hit a whole nest of baby mice. My husband had to go down and pipe that insulation that expands around all the pipes in the apartment which they used to cruise up and down the building.

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        1. Oh yes. That keeps them out for a while, though when I used it around pipes in one house, they chewed through it in no time. They seemed to be obsessed with the wild rice that my first wife kept in a kitchen cupboard. 🙂

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  10. (1) Some rodents are fun. A few weeks ago, I was perched 872 feet above Kyle Canyon on the summit of Cathedral Rock, feeding numerous chipmunks assorted nuts and figs out of the palm of my hand.
    (2) As a maker of mouse traps, Victor is no loser.
    (3) You killed a lot of mice! But you still disappoint me as a serial killer. All snap, and no crackle or pop!
    (4) The Great Mouse Detective will eventually track you down, Pete!
    (5) It’s commonly known that your screen name was Pistol Pete back when you starred in those Disney cartoons with Mickey Mouse.
    (6a) Overheard: “That’s one small snap for a mouse. One giant leap for mankind.”
    (6b) NASA wants to ship mice to the moon. “Let them eat cheese!”
    (7) John Steinbeck initially wrote a book entitled, “Of Mighty Mouse and X-Men.” But his editor said the story was too cheesy, so it all got changed.

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  13. Pete, my Mom was a good “country girl” growing up. When she came to visit a few years ago, a mouse got into our house…impossible to find, but a few days later we came home from work and my Mom said “I took care of that mouse”. My wife said “oh, is it OK?” My Mom replied, “you can’t really rehabilitate them.” Boom!

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  16. I hate rodents! I have the perfect way to rid the property of them….MoMo….she is my hunter seeker…..at last count there were 12 mice…..6 wood rats….9 moles….2 ‘possums”…..with cooler weather she is back at the hunt…..chuq

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    1. They can and do get into high-rise accommodation, Michel. They use all the internal wiring channels and shafts. They also like to use the cladding and insulation materials for nest-building. You are lucky to have been spared a mouse invasion. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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    1. I have seen evidence of mouse activity in the shed, but never seen a mouse. Like yours, they never came into the house. But if they had, it would have been ‘trap time’! 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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  19. Mice are horrid little things when the invade your home, I agree completely with you. We have ongoing issues with these rodents, when we’ll find on in a trap, every day, for a while, and then none. Until they’re back again, and the bait trap (we use peanut butter), then empty trap, and bait trap again thing goes on again.
    Our dog shows zero interest in catching these unwanted pests, she prefers to do her hunting outside, going after birds and reptiles …

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    1. I can see the difference with the mice brought in by cats. But house mice can bring in disease, even though they might look cute. And they breed so prolifically, you have to get on top of them before you get overrun. 🙂
      Best wishes, Pete.

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