<p>Sorry, this thread reminds me of a saying my dad is fond of:</p>
<p>“The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese”.</p>
<p>And a mouse story–we had one in the kitchen, wife is screaming hysterically “KILL IT, KILL IT!!!”. I grab the broom, adrenalin pumping, and hit the poor little guy so hard I broke the handle of the broom in two. It was a quick demise, over before he knew it…Sometimes a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.</p>
<p>I just noticed that the rubber gasket on the bottom of our garage door had a hole in it large enough for a mouse to squeeze through. I asked H to replace the darn gasket, but he said he had the gasket/mouse issue “covered”. When he saw my puzzled look, he pointed to the electronic trap strategically placed near the hole!</p>
<p>I have to echo UMDAD - never leave your moonroof open anywhere. We had a friend visit with his little kids one day last summer. They packed up late at night for the drive back to their house (about an hour away). Can you imagine his shock when his young daughter piped up from the back seat, “Thank you Daddy, for the pretty black cat!” He showed up about an hour and a half later to let our neighbor’s cat out of the car.</p>
<p>I’m very glad this one is extinct 
</p>
<p>[1-ton</a> rodent was size of small car - CNN.com](<a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/01/16/super.rat/index.html]1-ton”>1-ton rodent was size of small car - CNN.com)</p>
<p>OK - I’ve had the nocturnal visitor, too. D and I were at Walmart yesterday “stocking up” before she goes back to school this weekend. When I opened the trunk, I found the container that has lots of extra Dunkin Donuts napkins in it shredded into a million pieces. Even more, an extra LLBean backpack of D’s that had been in there since the fall (I brought it back from her school with some no longer needed slippers and had never gotten around to bringing in the house) also had a nicely pair of shredded slippers. We must have been quite the sight - screaming and carrying on in the parking lot - LOL! No sign of the little guy, but I kind of feel bad that I disposed of his warm bed, particularly since it has been frigid here at night this week. D’s solution is to bring our indoor cat to the car today and have her poke around inside for a bit to see if the mouse is still inside!</p>
<p>D-Con and other mouse and rat poisons cause the creature to scurry about looking for water. If it knows a way to the outside and can reach it before the poison kills it, you won’t have to deal with the stench of a decomposing rodent trapped somewhere between walls, or in other inaccessible spaces. </p>
<p>But if they make it outside and die there, they could be eaten by a neighborhood cat, dog, or even an owl or other bird of prey, which then dies from the poison also. Sigh…</p>
<p>We had a mouse eat D-Con and die in the wall between our pantry and garage a couple of winters ago. The smell was non- too-pleasant I assure you. H found the rather substantial hole the rodent had chewed through a pantry baseboard. The smell was emanating from there, but there was no way, other then tearing open the wall, to get to the carcass. He ended up filling the hole with some of that expanding spray foam insulation you get in a can. It muted the smell considerable, and in a couple of days, we no longer smelled it. If we get a mouse this winter (and the odds are in favor of it), I’ll look for an electronic trap, or something else that will trap and kill the thing without poison. I’d hate to be responsible for killing one of my neighbor’s pets as a result of them eating a mouse snack from my house. On winter nights, I love lying in bed, listening to the owls calling in the nearby trees. I’d also really hate to inadvertently kill one by way of one of our poisoned mice.</p>
<p>Willard remembered.</p>
<p>So sorry I missed this thread until now–I guess. Two words: MOTH FLAKES. I won’t go into the gory details of our own mouse problem, but a few weeks ago my chatty dental hygienist shared her car repair guy’s solution (she had them under the hood). Use moth flakes or moth balls in a mesh bag or another container, and the mice stay away.</p>
<p>Fast forward: My H put moth flakes in small containers with holes poked in them–pill bottles, Glad disposable food storage thingies, etc.–and stuffed the containers everywhere the disgusting little critters were gaining entrance to our kitchen–probably five or six locations. We have not seen a mouse or their yucky residue since. You don’t have to deal with rodent rigor mortis or anything, because they just seem to stay away. (When we used traps, my H could not understand why I refused to dispose of even the really stiff ones.) We think they came from our neighbor’s house anyway, so I guess they’ve moved back over there. :)</p>
<p>Moth balls worked some years ago as a pigeon repellent, too.</p>
<p>I completely understand your shock and disgust over your newly found mouse problem. I had been smelling something horrible in my car for the last week, but could not figure out what it was. I’m not a fast food fan and I knew I hadn’t left any groceries in the car. My mother suggested I check the trunk for groceries, and even though I never use the trunk, I decided to take a look. It had chewed up my afghan, some wrapping paper and other papers that were in there and made a nest! There was poop underneath the entire area where the nest was sitting when I pulled it out. It was all I could do to get it to the dumpster without getting sick!</p>
<p>My problem is that I live in an apartment and never have access to a garage, where I read people typically pick up mice. I have ruled out any possibility of bringing something into my care that already had a mouse in it, so how did it get there??? I drive a 2009 Hyundai Sonata, and I don’t see how a mouse would get in the trunk I never open.</p>
<p>Now that I know it’s there, I have read all day about people’s wires being chewed, traps being set, poison being used, but the vermin keep coming back. I know I need to completely clean out the trunk, but the thought of finding more mouse evidence terrifies me.</p>
<p>Should I leave everything alone and take the car to the dealership? I’m so scared and confused. Someone please help!</p>
<p>Take the car to a detail shop and let them deal with it. They’ve seen everything.</p>
<p>Anyone smell a rat, err… a mouse… err… a ■■■■■??? Curious as to why a brand new poster (as of today) would pick this thread to resurrect from over a year ago, (though granted, it was an amusing thread), claiming the OP’s to be a “newly found problem” and posted their one and only post?? Real post? Maybe?? Maybe not…</p>
<p>■■■■■? Maybe, but Google tends to pull up the oddest things. Ispowell, I give you benefit of the doubt. And I had a mouse in my car that chewed up some upholstery. Dumped a perfectly competent mechanic because I think it came from his workshop.</p>
<p>Did it have babies?</p>
<p>
^^^ The mouse or the mechanic? :D</p>
<p>I hate rats. I work on the ground floor of a parking structure and we used to have rats running over our heads. We called it the “rat olympics”. They usually came out after 5 and if I were working late I would flee the premises. I was sure one was going to fall on my head. It was awful.</p>
<p>If there was one type of animal I could have exterminated from this planet, it would be reptiles. Snakes, lizards, iguanas, all of them. </p>
<p>If I saw a snake I don’t care if it’s endangered, it’ll be mincemeat before you can scream.</p>
<p>So do reptiles live in cold or hot climates? Because I’m going wherever they’re likely to either broil or freeze to death. I was thinking about moving to Canada after undergrad just to avoid reptiles.</p>
<p>I’m with Shrinkrap. Once you’ve had rats, mice seem cute. When we had a dog, his bowl of food was in the house. I started noticing pieces of food lining up the walls of the house and under furniture and could not at first figure out how or why he was doing this. Then we noticed the droppings. We stopped leaving food out and DH put snap traps out but no luck. One night DS was walking past a sliding glass door we have and noticed a HUGE rat in between the glass and the screen working his way to the small opening – it’s true what they say about a rat collapsing it’s body to an inch or so. After much screaming by me and the kids, DH pulled the screen out from outside and the rat scurried off. That was when I informed DH that we were now at Defcon 1 and needed to get an electronic trap. Sure enough, we set that trap by the entrance the rats were using and caught an entire family of rats over the next few weeks. Then later we set it on a wall and caught a few more. Lots of foliage around here. No more rats in the house.</p>
<p>
If you did that we’d have an awful lot more rats, mice, other rodents, and bugs in this world. </p>
<p>
I have a couple of those and have caught a lot of rats with them. They’re very easy to use and dispose of the rat and the rat doesn’t suffer like they sometimes do in other types of traps. I even bungeed one to a limb of an avocado tree to get the rats eating my crop and it worked well there.</p>
<p>If you’re serious about not wanting to be around snakes, they are illegal in Hawaii and only have had a few random sightings and captures. We’re trying hard to keep the brown tree snake out, since it has decimated the native plants & animals in other places, including Guam. We do have other reptiles tho, particularly in our zoo’s reptile house. Some people also do smuggle them in illegally as “pets.” <sigh> We also have Jackson Chameleons.</sigh></p>
<p>[Local</a> News | Mouse rolling in dough in Oregon ATM | Seattle Times Newspaper](<a href=“http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009626145_mouseatm09m.html]Local”>http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2009626145_mouseatm09m.html)</p>
<p>"An employee at the Gem Stop Chevron in La Grande got the surprise of her life when she opened up the automated teller machine and found a mouse inside a nest lined with $20 bills.</p>
<p>The ATM continued to work just fine, despite the mouse discovered on Thursday. The mouse had chewed up two bills and damaged another 14 to make its nest.</p>
<p>The mouse got a reprieve: It was evicted from its nest but set free outside."</p>
<p>LOL.</p>