Help us capture smart mice!!!

[Ms.Grumpy]

I truly believe that the mice that we have are super smart, talk about survival of the fittest! We have spotted small baby mice in our home and I think that momma has educated her children very well on how to stay away from traps. As a teacher I can appreciate this passing on of knowledge, but I am sooo freaked out by them. We have tried glue traps, and the regular traps, and they do not fall for it. My parents who live downstairs are doing the same as we are, and nada, zip, zero! I do not like to put out poison, because then we have to play the terrible game of find the disgusting smell

If anyone has any tips on how to capture our new intruders, I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[3disAddicts]

My parents had this problem and baited the traps with sweets like jelly beans or peanut butter. Worked like a charm according to them.

 

[deva]

Have you tried peanut butter as the bait in the regular "snap traps"?

 

[etoiles]

We had smart mice in our house as well. We would put peanut butter, crackers, all sorts of goodies in the traps and in the morning the food would be gone but no mouse! They were intelligent little devils.

The thing that worked for us 100% and got rid of the mice was a device that emits a high frequency ultrasonic wave. The mouse can apparently hear the frequency but no one else can and so it annoys the mouse enough that the mouse leaves. You have to get one of these that will automatically change the frequency slighly every now and then or the mouse will get used to it.

Mice are now gone from our house! The device does not irritate my cat either. (although she may be irritated that now she has nothing to hunt!)

We got ours on Amazon.com. Just plug it into an outlet and no more mice and perfectly humane!

 

[Mickey527]

I have always had good luck with the large size sticky trays and peanut butter in the middle of the tray. I tried the small size for mice but they always manage to eat the peanut butter and get off the trap. I know they were stuck because of the hair and footprints left.
The big ones are for rats but big enough for a little mouse to get stuck and not be able to get off.
Of course my son who loves any creatures won't stand for me putting the live mouse in a plastic bag to suffocate. He takes them out to the woods and sprays them with cooking oil. That breaks down the sticky stuff enough for the mouse to get off and live happily ever after away from my house.
I have 2 cats who bring me home birds on a daily basis. You would think these guys would be able to catch a little mouse or two. I think they figure if it is in the house it must be a pet. After all, we have fish, lizards, two cats, a dog, and a water frog and toad. Used to have scorpions, tarantulas and snakes too but they went on to better places out of my house.

 

[jltwdw]

Traps have to be placed along a mouse's route, not just randomly on the floor someplace. They generally travel along baseboards...or in my case along the backsplash of the kitchen cupboard. I've had success placing both glue and snap traps along their routes...I think they just run into them rather than search them out for the goodie placed on them. In the fall when our country mice decide they'd like to settle down in our warm, cozy house is when we start seeing them. I place a glue trap on the cupboard below the backsplash, then block it in with empty cereal boxes and place something on the backsplash creating a block and forcing them to jump down to try and go around...voila! A stuck mouse...I've even caught two in one glue trap before! I did discover though, that since I can't make myself actually do the deed of killing them once they are stuck; I'd just throw them out the door, trap and all into the snow (using tongs and doing the 'eeew, eeew, eeew' dance) but the glue would freeze/harden, allowing the mouse to free itself (but leaving quite a bit of hair behind). Now I make the kids go out and smack them with a shovel...they don't seem to have the inhibitions I do...

 

[mrsbornkuntry]

We get one or two mice in our house from the field behind us, especially in the winter. I bought the traps where you don't actually see the mouse after it's caught and baited it with peanut butter. I caught one mouse that way, but I think the other one caught on . I got some peppermint essential oil and put it on some cotton balls and put them in the areas where the mouse had been. I also bought some Mrs. Meyers peppermint and vanilla cleaners (this may just be available at Christmas) and added a little more peppermint oil to it and used it to clean out my cupboards, floors, and anyplace else they had been. It seems to be working really well and has also worked to keep the ants off of my counters this summer when I learned I had them .

 

[StephMK]

We had a mouse that was coming in through the back of some kitchen cabinets - when DH was out of town & the house was on the market! I couldn't bring myself to use a kill trap but found a cage trap at Walmart. It's a little plastic rectangular box with one wall folded down, when the mouse crawls in to get the treat, the weight of the mouse entering brings up the wall. I took it to the woods, pushed the wall back down & let him escape.

It worked great & thankfully don't think any more ever came in.

 

[mackeysmom]

I, too, had "smart mice" this past winter. Tried everything to no avail.

But ...... then I found these: http://www.homedepot.com/webapp/wcs...langId=-1&catalogId=10053&productId=100557786

Worked like a charm

Good luck,
Laura

 

[Ms.Grumpy]

Thanks everyone for such quick and awesome responses.

I will try the bigger glue traps, as I was using the small ones, because I saw small mice. It makes perfect sense to use the bigger trap so that they have to walk on it to reach the food.

The idea of placing them on their route is awsome also. DH was putting the traps were we would see them run by, but creating a road block that will lead them to the trap is genius! Jltwdw thanks for sharing that! My brain will be put to work on creating the road blocks.

I have also read about peppermint on cottonballs, but I had totally forgotten about that, mrsbornkuntry thanks for the reminder.

I will share this awesome info with DH and see what HE wants to do, as I am to chicken.

 

[TupperMom7]

Why would you glue them to something when there are other alternative methods? We bought the kind of traps that look like a rectangular box. You open the door and put a little peanut butter in the back of it. The mouse goes in, the door shuts and he can't get out. These work so well, we caught two mice in one night in the same trap! The though of gluing them to something would bother me too much - I mean it is a mouse, not a scorpion or something!

 

[zachnsamsmommy]

Why would you glue them to something when there are other alternative methods? We bought the kind of traps that look like a rectangular box. You open the door and put a little peanut butter in the back of it. The mouse goes in, the door shuts and he can't get out. These work so well, we caught two mice in one night in the same trap! The though of gluing them to something would bother me too much - I mean it is a mouse, not a scorpion or something!

We used the glue ones b/c nothing else worked! We have smart mice, too . I am a big animal lover, but the humane traps never caught them. We just take them (glue board and all) a few miles away to the country (nothing but cows) along with some vegetable oil and a plastic spoon. Pour the oil on them, use the spoon to loosen the glue, and watch them run to freedom. My younger son feels so good that we didn't have to kill them. I really don't like the glue traps, but like them much better than snap traps.

 

[luvdzne]

We get mice in our garage during the winter. Nothing was catching them so we decided to try the glue traps with peanut butter in the middle. What we ended up with was no mouse and no peanut butter. I think we had Houdini mice because they were able to get the peanut butter out of the middle leaving teeth marks in the sticky stuff.

 

[HLAuburn]

Why would you glue them to something when there are other alternative methods? We bought the kind of traps that look like a rectangular box. You open the door and put a little peanut butter in the back of it. The mouse goes in, the door shuts and he can't get out. These work so well, we caught two mice in one night in the same trap! The though of gluing them to something would bother me too much - I mean it is a mouse, not a scorpion or something!

We also had good luck with the little plastic boxes....they go in for the treat through a one way door and they can't get out. Then we took them way down the street to some woods to release them. DH did the glue traps too, but it was pretty mean, IMO. BUT, even though they're kinda cute (unlike a scorpion ), they carry all sorts of diseases so they need to be gone one way or another.

 

[ma2jr]

Anyone else see the irony... ahem Mickey?

 

[hrh_disney_queen]

We have a humane mouse trap that works really well. We used to use it in our old house that had a few mice-we would catch one or two a night. Then DH would take them out across the street to let them go. Now he is using it in our Montana house and he catches one or two per day. I am sure that the same mouse keeps coming back at times, so maybe our mice aren't as smart as yours. Anyway this thing is a metal box. It has a release door on one end, air holes in the top. Towards the other end on one side is a hole that they go into to get dogfood. When they go in, they set off a spring action scoop sort of, and flipped into the larger box part. DH checks it several times a day. I think if he couldn't catch them humanely, we would have to get used to living with them.

the mice out there are so cute, you could never kill one. They are small and round with HUGE black eyes, like those big eyed kids in the posters of the 70's.

 

[etoiles]

I still recommend the device that lets out an electronic signal. We did have a 'trap' that caught mice - our cat ate two of them - but we still had them pooping on the counter. The traps may not catch them all but this device will get rid of them completely.

We have kept it plugged in since the mice incident and they have never returned to our house either since.

 

[NeverlandClub23]

Since I was a little girl and was devastated when I found a dead mouse in a mouse trap, my parents found a cheap, humane way to get rid of our annual mice (for some reason when we get a lot of rain they try to come into our house!). They take a very deep plastic bucket and put seeds in the bottom (birdseed, sunflower seeds, etc.). They put a wooden board against the bucket, leading the mice up to the mouth of the bucket. They jump in to eat the seed but can't jump/climb out. I take them to a local field/forest and let them go . But I find mice cute so others may not be able to deal with a bucket of mice in their cars .

 

[twooley2]

we had a mouse eat my husbands motorcycle seat in our garage talk about needing to kill a mouse. We went to home depot and bought two traps that were extra large not the little ones and placed beef on them. REgular steak meat or meat chunks. I thought mice would not want beef but found that they did in less than an hour the mouse was in the trap and than my husband drowned it in a bucket of water.

 

[ilovebassets]

Do you have a friend with a cat or a loud dog that with a scary bark? If you can borrow someone's pet, that might work. My parents were having problems with squirrels in their attic and my basset hound, with its deep loud howl, scared them away. He runs up and down the long hallway under upstairs under the attic howling away for a few minutes running after a ball and the squirrels disappeared. Of course, he's harmless but his bark is big and scary.