wow! I can’t even imagine doing that, @BunsenBurner. So you just dug it up? Weren’t ants crawling all over your car? Makes me shudder.
Yup. Just shoveled the whole thing into the trashcans. Nighttime was our friend. The stinkers were asleep. B-) Chilly evening helped, too. The ants rode in the back of Mr. B’s truck. 
Ant wranglers. 
As I mentioned before we live in a wooded area. The mice are so bad they have destroyed our cedar surround of our outdoor hot tub. We have bait stations outside but they just keep coming! They like to crawl up inside the heating element to get away from our winter weather and then they die in the electrical panel. I really dislike rodents.
Ugh. Dead rodents in electrical panels. Just ugh. Here, squirrels love to get inside transformer cans on powerlines with predictable results. A loud boom, a flash of bright sparkly light, and darkness… until PSE duded come out, say a few choice words, and fix up the mess.
Yes, the tenants who lived in our house somehow had a mouse or rat in the house who ate through a hose in both the washing machine and dishwasher. We didn’t notice right away, but it did ruin the motor of the washing machine and we had to pay for it to be replaced. 
Of course, we had to pay to have both hoses replaced as well.
Our rodent chewed through the dishwasher drain hose, that was a mess when it was discovered!
Wow. This is not my experience at all. My cats (three, in succession, over 29 years, the longest tenured of them male) have all been 100% effective at getting rid of mice. None of them has been above playing with their prey, but it’s very rare that any gets away without human intervention, and some or most of them are usually eaten.
My current cat is an adorable, cuddly calico, who seems to have approximately the psychology of Hannibal Lecter when it comes to mice, chipmunks, and small birds. A few feet from our kitchen door, I once found, arranged in a neat square about 3 feet apart, a partially eaten chipmunk body, some chipmunk guts, a chipmunk skull, and the chipmunk face that had been pulled off the skull.
Cats have the instinct to hunt, but they also need to be taught what to hunt, and if they aren’t they won’t know. I had a cat corner a gerbil that was dumb enough to escape, and the cat that cornered him was a complete doofus and didn’t know what to do (another of my cats would have taken it out in a split second), it depends on the cat, my current cat is quite the hunter, even though we got him at a young age. With cats, they have a deterrent effect in many cases, they don’t have to necessarily kill the mice, having the smell around seems to deter them from coming in, least it has in my experience, as long as the cat wanders around the house, it seems to work (as with everything, YMMV).
Some are awesome hunters, some are like the kitten in that looney toons cartoon who ends up pulling a little wagon carrying the mouse instead of catching it!