<p>I live in an old farmhouse, and this time of year the mice start to come in. I have had luck in the past using just snap-mouse traps. This year, I have baited them with everything from peanut butter to cheese to bread, and ALWAYS the bait is gone, and the trap is not sprung.</p>
<p>My husband thinks I am obsessed, (and also thinks I am just feeding them), and perhaps so, because I check them every time I come in the house. I have trouble setting them without snapping my fingers, so I CANNOT figure out how they are eating my bait and not getting trapped?</p>
<p>Don’t want to use poison (afraid my cats or dogs will eat the poisoned mouse) or sticky traps (cruel)…YET. Am at my wits end.</p>
<p>We use Snickers bars (or, the inside of Snickers bars. Take the chocolate off). Wedge it into the trap so the mice CAN’T lick it out–they have to gnaw on it for a while.</p>
<p>Also, mousetraps are inexpensive. New ones work better than old, so we’ve stopped reusing them. We just throw the whole thing away, mouse and all.</p>
<p>In our big house, we didn’t have mice. Our two cats, outdoor cats, would regularly bring us “presents” which we would find in the morning outside our door. Chipmunks, mice… you get the idea… whom our cats had sent on to Mice and Chipmunk heaven, presenting us with their proud evidence.</p>
<p>Then we moved to a smaller place which featured the occasional (a little too occasional for my taste) mouse in the basement. We still had the two cats?!?! They took no interest in our resident mice (maybe they feel like siblings if living in the same dwelling?)</p>
<p>The peanut butter disappeared from our unsprung traps too.</p>
<p>We kept a fair amount of food in our cellar… sort of looked like a Costco/Sams Club annex down there. I found out that mice will chew right threw cracker boxes, plastic bags containing walnuts etc. I started putting ALL food items into completely airtight/mouseproof Sterlite containers etc. … they stopped coming in. Might be harder to do in an old farmhouse, because something else might be attracting them. But if you’re storing food… worth the trouble, imo.</p>
<p>I had a great mouser who kept our house pretty much free. He has gone on to the great kitty heaven. Current cat does not kill. Clearly a genetic abnormality since he had plenty of hunting training from mom. MY h has caulked himself silly and they still want “in” this time of year. We are seriously considering a second cat. I get seriously put out when you surprise one and it looks at you like “what are you doing here.”</p>
<p>I’ve been using a Victor electronic rat trap with great success (they’re drawn by the avocados I grow). It looks like a little mailbox. The rat goes in after the peanut butter and gets electrocuted. The rat doesn’t suffer as can happen with a snap trap and there’s no goryness. One just picks up the trap and dumps the rat out without ever having to touch it. The trap is good for dozens of rats on a single set of batteries. They also make a mouse version although I haven’t used one of those. You might want to give one of these a try (google it).</p>
<p>We had an ongoing battle with squirrels getting into our attic. What finally worked was getting a contractor out for two days to absolutely block every tiny access point. The dryer vent was their little highway into the attic, and with a screened vent, the dryer still works and squirrels are back outside where they belong.</p>
<p>In my last apartment, where field mice would sometimes show up during the winter, Ziggy presented me with several dead mice as gifts, including one he shoved under the bathroom door while I was in there. Another time there was a mouse he’d killed sitting on the floor surrounded by his toy mice. I wasn’t wearing my glasses, and leaned over to pick it up with the rest, and realized at the last second that it had little hands and feet and probably was real. I also once found a dead mouse directly underneath the center of his litter box. My theory is that he chased it under there, and it either died of a heart attack or he sat on it.</p>
<p>Now that I’m in Manhattan, I’m hoping to be mouse-free this winter.</p>
<p>“Now that I’m in Manhattan, I’m hoping to be mouse-free this winter.”</p>
<p>I hope you’re roach free too…Many years back my East side apartment had roaches, and steel wool and boric acid were my staples. I would get creeped out eveytime the exterminator came because they seemed to find their way to my place for the two days following a visit by him.</p>
<p>Use the snap traps with the extended yellow plastic trigger. As for bait a little cotton with peanut butter or cotton with a dab of vanilla, or a tiny piece of bacon. Place the trigger facing the wall near where you have seen them (or their droppings). And if they are very sneaky place 3 traps in a row trigger facing wall, trigger facing away from wall, trigger facing wall.
Good Luck… Change the location of the traps often because mice are curious about anything new so it interests them when you move things - Rats are phobic of anything new so you don’t move their traps…</p>
<p>I have found that super-gluing a nut (walnut) to the trap works very well. Maybe even a dab of peanut butter on the nut. have very sneaky mice. I use the old fashioned snap traps and throw them out after one use.</p>
<p>Would you like to borrow my cat? So far this week she has brought me 8 moles, 5 mice, a very large grasshopper and then Thursday night a full grown rabbit, which I suspect was not fully dead. She is disgusted with me because I won’t let her bring them in the house, so she drapes them all over the back steps. However, she took the rabbit and disappeared under the shed. This time of year all she wants to do is hunt. This morning she woke me up a 5 wanting to go out and get started.</p>
<p>I like the plain spring traps from Victor i think. There are three secrets to making them work really good.
Use chunky peanut butter. It is harder for them to get off. And like someone said wedge it in somwhere tight so they have to fiddle with it more.
2.Sometimes the metal clip isn’t bent enuf and the bar doesnt slide off good, so if you bend it it will work better.
After I make them super sensitive, i put a cuple sheets of paper under the trap and slide it off onto the floor so there is less vibration.
I had the plain old spring traps work better then any other kind and it usually kills them right away. I have a cat and he doesn’t eat mice and sometimes they get away cause he plays with them to much.</p>
<p>I don’t deal with the mouse traps but I do feed the cat. My husband swears by chunky peanut butter. He says it’s harder for the mice to lick off and they get caught more easily with it. So far, the cat has caught two mice, and the mousetraps have caught two mice…this week.</p>
<p>Mice are cute, but mice poop on my kitchen countertops is not. We are having the same problem, the mice have gotten too smart. They eat the bait and the trap remains unsprung. I even tried putting bait in the middle of a glue trap (they were ignoring it). They managed to lean in and eat without even a paw print on the trap. BTW, our mice love bananas.</p>
<p>Cats are not an option. Serious allergies in the family. (The kind that send you to the ER.)</p>
<p>Had a rat in the garage after the door was left open at night. The Victor electronic trap did the trick on the first setting. It’s expensive, but I’m too squeamish to deal with the spring traps. It’s still set up because DD is convinced rat babies were produced that night.</p>