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And all through the house… — 16 Comments

  1. I’ve never encountered a live mouse in my house– on Christmas Eve or any other time– but I have two cats, and I expect any self-respecting mouse would “get the hell out of Dodge” if it did wander in from the city streets.

  2. I had a mouse in my house a few months ago and I trapped it with one of those plastic, non-lethal traps and let it loose outside. A couple of days later I saw another mouse that looked very similar, but then a lot of mice look alike so I just assumed it was a different mouse and we might have a bigger problem on our hands. I trapped this mouse using the same trap (although he did manage do get the piece of cheese out of the trap without setting it off once) and once again put him outside — further away this time.

    A few days later he returned. At this point I was pretty sure it was the same mouse. I set the trap again and actually caught him trying very carefully to remove the cheese. The trap closed before he got the cheese and he stood next to the trap, staring at it and then he stared at me before scurrying off. I finally caught him again and we drove him a couple miles away before releasing him. He hasn’t returned.

    I don’t really mind mice. If I could train one to use a mini litter box, I wouldn’t really care if he ran around the house.

    Rats, however, are a different story.

  3. Living in country, or at least a reasonable distance between houses field mice are a battle beginning of winter as they look for a warm cozy living space. Generations of them in the last almost 3 decades you think are the same mouse, kinda cute my wife thinks of their dead carcass.

  4. I was sitting reading in my family room one night when I spied a mouse making its way along the base of the book case opposite me. I watched it until it looked over and saw me watching it. It jumped high in the air, higher than I thought it could, and took off. It was around that time that I took the lid off the steel can that held dry dog food and saw a half dozen little mice inside. I have no idea how they got in there. Anyway, my daughter and I carefully lifted them out and took them about a block away and set them free. The mother may have been the one that saw me watching it.

  5. If I could train one to use a mini litter box, I wouldn’t really care if he ran around the house.

    Same here, but they shit and piss everywhere. I had a bunch nesting under the stove, and it was fun to see bits of insulation slowly moving across the floor. But eventually I couldn’t deal with the mess anymore and trapped them all, about 14 IIRC. Live traps don’t work as well as the snap traps, and modern snap traps don’t work as well as the old fashioned ones. Such is progress.

  6. If I could train one to use a mini litter box, I wouldn’t really care if he ran around the house.

    Same here, but they shit and piss everywhere. I had a bunch nesting under the stove, and it was fun to see bits of insulation slowly moving across the floor for nest building. But eventually I couldn’t deal with the mess anymore and trapped them all, about 14 IIRC. Live traps don’t work as well as the snap traps, and modern snap traps don’t work as well as the old fashioned ones. Such is progress.

  7. Never had a mouse inside the house, but I did find one of their flying cousins hanging from the bookshelf in my bedroom. Carefully caught it and let it go outside. I doubt he was from Wuhan.
    I have been up on the tractor pulling a bush hog and you can see mice or small rats running in the tall grass in front of the tractor.

  8. I am with Chuck. We have a lake house – an old one, the core of the structure is > 100 years old – an hour away and every few winters it get overrun by mice. Finding their droppings all over the place is disappointing because of the work involved in washing every utensil in every drawer the mice have decorated . . . . so out come the strategically placed traps and the peanut butter. Some winters we have no mice visit us, and some winters I’ve sent a half dozen or more to that great wheel of cheese in the sky.
    Now your mouse-in-the-house story Neo – that was funny. It made me chuckle.

  9. That is a deer mouse, a nasty disease vector. I live in the country, so every fall and winter I run a trap line. I reccomend Tomcat brand traps, they are very effective at mouse elimination.

  10. Darling story, well told.

    Mice are not as bad as some other pests but they do intrude and leave droppings everywhere! We had so many in our old basement with French drain, crawl space, cylinder block old walls. This was on the East Coast. Our neighbors told us to just co-exist with them but we couldn’t stand it. We didn’t want to put out poison so we finally hired a company that sent dedicated men who went over the entire basement and applied a rigid metal netting over every crack and crevice. One of these gentlemen cut his hand badly and we drove him to the emergency room. He was such a good sport about it and insisted on going back to work. It took them several days but after that we never saw another mouse.

    My neighbors here in California tell me there are gophers around and the occasional snake in the garage. So far no sightings.

  11. In New Mexico they (small rodents of usual size) are the vector for Hanta virus, but that virus is geographically limited IIRC.

  12. Not very humane, but very effective: glue boards. If a mouse gets two legs on it, s/he is a goner. They may have a leg or two off and they can drag the thing a ways, but they can’t get through the small spaces they use, and they can’t eat or drink. Like I said, not humane, but, as cute as they are, they’re one hell of a disease vector as they crap and pee over everything.

    Had one momma get up into the cars ventilation system, build a nest on top of the cabin air filter and drop a litter. Stunk like hell, because besides the usual mouse waste product, one of the babies died, so i had the additional odor of a tiny rotting corpse. It took 2 15 minute sessions with ozone generator to make the inside of the car bearable.

    It’s nothing personal, but I won’t have the little buggers living with me.

  13. I’m startled how many of you release a mouse outside, as if you were Hindus afraid of killing even bugs. Where do you think the mouse came from? From outside, and you will see it again.
    But you don’t mind killing fish, chickens, cows, and pigs for their flesh, do you? We eat our oysters alive and raw, as you up north eat your cherrystone clams.

    I had rats in my attic once. They climbed a tree next to the house, ran along an overhanging branch, jumped onto the roof, went 30 feet to a vulnerable roof junction and dug their way in there. Took a rodent detective to figure that out and find the hidden entry hole. But it’s very disconcerting to hear them running over one’s ceiling in the evening!

    I’ve had a rare mouse in my garage. Came from outside. Chewed a hole in my extra bag of dry dog food. Dead in classic mousetrap next day, no suffering like on a glue board.

    Hanta virus, contained in mouse feces, is 100% fatal. Fortunately it is rare, occurs mostly in New Mexico.

  14. Cicero:

    This incident happened many years ago, and I never saw another mouse, and I live in the exact same place.

    I had someone come and find the ways in which the mouse could have entered, and plug them up. No more mice.

    When I have lived in other places – most notably an apartment in the Boston area in the 1970s – we killed enough mice to constitute a regiment. They kept coming back – not the same ones obviously, but others.

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