Mouse in the House

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There have been mice in our house for a few years. At one point we thought we got rid of them, but then we found more droppings. My mother has been setting traps, but I really think that they’re only getting a few of the mice, not all of them. I don’t even think most of them go near the traps. So I looked online for some ideas and I found the pure pepperment oil idea. I like the idea, but there’s one problem. What if the mice aren’t coming through a hole, but rather came in from some boxes my mother brought into the house? If we put the pepperment oil around the house, it would cause the mice to move, but where (if there is no hole)?

Fortunately, they have only been roaming our basement. But I want to get rid of them. They are unclean and dirty and could someone sick. Plus they make me scared to stay downstairs. Any ideas?

Thank you.
 
Have you tried the electronic/sonic pest repellents? I’ve had many people, including a couple veterinarians tell me they don’t work. However, we had a really bad mouse problem 11-12 years ago. Traps & poison weren’t working and we didn’t want to pay an exterminator. I went to the hardware store and picked up two of the electronic units (they were on sale and cost less than $20 total). A week later we were mouse-free. We haven’t had mice since, and have only had fleas on our dogs twice since then (not an outbreak or infestation but two isolated incidences of 3-4 fleas).
 
Get a cat…worked for us. Haven’t seen a mouse in 12 years since we got the cat.
 
A cat is a great idea!! We’ve never had a mouse problem while we had a cat (well, the cat we have now is a totally declawed foundling, so he isn’t much of a mouser).

If having a cat isn’t an option, I recommend D-Con poison. As long as their are no children or animals in the area you need to put them down. It has always worked for us.
 
About 30 years ago we had a mouse problem in the apartment we then lived in. It seemed to be infested with mice. I was setting traps (the old-fashioned ones that kill the mouse when it starts to eat the bait) with cheese - the commonest mouse bait. Well, our mice were experienced mice!! They were able to get the cheese off the trap without getting caught! I set these traps each night and each morning, there they were - no cheese remaining, no mouse caught!

I thought that, clearly, I needed a bait that would be more difficult for them to get free from the trap. After a while, I decided to use curried beef. Why? No idea!! It just came to me to try that - the beef would be more solid than cheese, the curry flavor would attract them. So, that night I set three traps and placed one in the living room; one in our bedroom; and one in the kitchen.

Some time in the middle of the night I woke up when I heard the trap in the bedroom snap - “Aha!” I thought, “gotcha!” and went back to sleep. However, a short time later I was re-awakened by a strange noise. Listening for a little bit (I didn’t put on a light, as my husband was sleeping soundly through all of this), I thought that the trap had been flipped over when it caught the mouse and that another one was trying to get at the bait. I just went back to sleep.

In the morning I found that, actually, two mice had been caught in the bedroom trap at the same time. It had flipped over. One of them had not been killed outright when it had snapped and the noise I had heard was the second one trying to extricate itself from the trap. It failed and, by morning, it too was dead.

I took the trap and headed into the kitchen to empty the two corpses into the garbage bin, only to fine that the trap in the kitchen had worked well, also - there was one mouse caught in the trap and a second one lying dead inches away from the trap - that one must have got a blow as it approached the trap that killed it without catching it!

So, I emptied both traps and headed to the living room - to find two more mice caught in the third trap!!

I had no more trouble with mice for a long time after that and always used curried beef as bait whenever I did need to eliminate a mouse problem. Make sure that you remove some pieces of beef from your cooking pot before the meat begins to get really soft from the cooking - you need it to still a bit tough / chewy.

Of course, I live in Trinidad, where curry is almost a staple food. Our mice probably have a taste for it!! But, it’s worth trying anywhere as it seems to be quite irresistible.😃
 
Joan_M said:
About 30 years ago we had a mouse problem in the apartment we then lived in…
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Great story, Joan! I’ve been told that it’s the early bird that gets the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese. Apparently not, if the second mouse is too close to the first one 😃

I go with getting a cat. We have two cats, no mice, and the skinks that get in are also soon done away with. Both of ours are declawed, but that doesn’t hinder them in catching mice; they still have teeth.

DaveBj
 
when I lived in the country we also had a “mouse” problem, I got some decon and set out poisoning the mice. A few days later I went out walking in the back pasture and found quite a few dead owls. After seeing the second dead owl I looked closer and could not find a reason for its death, then it hit me, the mouse poison!

As I was trying to think of a way to get rid of the mice with out poisoning the owls around our house I remembered the time I had a gerbil and I had gotten the wrong type of bedding- Cedar chips, My gerbil became sick so I decided to try it. I placed satchels inside of my cupboards and on the counter tops at night. I also used it in my garden around the house. The mouse population diminished with in a week. A little more work but I stopped seeing the dead owls on my walks. I have used traps in the past and I am ok with it if it kills them right away but out and out I don’t like some of the crueler ones such as the Glue traps.

If you do get a cat make sure that you pull up any poison you have been using on the mice as if the cat injests the poisoned mouse the cat will also be poisoned.
 
The only warning with a cat. They usually don’t eat the mouse, just kill it, and bring it to you as a gift. So don’t be surprised if you wake up and see you cat at the foot of your bed with a dead mouse in his mouth.
 
Joannm said:
The only warning with a cat. They usually don’t eat the mouse, just kill it, and bring it to you as a gift. So don’t be surprised if you wake up and see you cat at the foot of your bed with a dead mouse in his mouth.
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Our cats will eat what they catch, if we let them, and so will the two semi-feral cats at the factory where I am security chief. It’s so funny to watch one of them coming back from the field with a dead rodent in her mouth, and the other one will run up to her. You can almost hear her: “Ya gonna share, huh? Huh? Ya gonna share?”

DaveBj
 
You can always go for a rat terrier if you don’t like cats. They’re loyal and have been bred to hunt dem der varmints.

Another issue is food source: Have one area besides the fridge that serves as a pantry, preferably a closet that has the food in it. Line the bottom of the area with sticky traps, and you’ll catch every mouse that goes under the door to get to the pantry. It worked for me.
 
As much as I don’t like cats in the house, they are successful mousers!

If you don’t want a pet cat forever, perhaps you could “borrow” a friend’s cat (find one known to be a mouser–and hopefully one that’s not uncomfortable away from home) for a month or so. Any existing baby mice will be weaned at about 3 weeks, so keeping a cat around for a little over 3 weeks should kill all adult mice and any offspring before they’re able to reproduce again.
 
they come in this time of year, with the first rain, that floods their holes outside. we use old fashioned mousetraps, but bait them with spreadable cheese, rather than solid cubes, by the time they try to lick it of, crack the trap works, as many traps as I put out, that is how many dead meeses I find the next morning, takes a week, then they are gone until the next cold snap. we block the holes as best as we can but they are smarter than us when it comes to getting in.
 
Our dauchsaund will tear up the floor to get to a mouse or chew a hole in the closet door! I started feeding some stray cats in my neighborhood a few years and the mice (and the skunk we thought was living under the house) disappeared.
 
If you do get a cat, it should be one whose momma taught him how to catch and kill mice when he was a kitten. I’ve heard that if a cat didn’t learn this skill, it wouldn’t be much of a mouser.
 
Tenebrae said:
If you do get a cat, it should be one whose momma taught him how to catch and kill mice when he was a kitten. I’ve heard that if a cat didn’t learn this skill, it wouldn’t be much of a mouser.
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My female cat is an excellent mouser, and she eats what she kills - ALL of it. She came from a vet’s office when she was a tiny kitten, so I don’t know who would have taught her to hunt - I think it’s inborn.

If you want to use a traditional mousetrap, my dad always recommends peanut butter.
 
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