Problem with mice!

I found better mouse & rat traps. The rodent is killed before he gets to the bait, there are two entrances to the bait & you can dispose of him much easier without getting your hands near him. And they are much safer & easier to set. I put them in a friend's house & got results quickly.
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Ken Anderson said:
This being an old house (1910), if we go away for more than a couple of weeks, we'll sometimes have mice in the house when we return. With some exceptions, including one mouse that she decided to grant amnesty to, Ella gets right on the job, and will wait for hours at a point of entry until she dispatches the intruders. However, after she killed one and remained vigilant, I bought a couple of traps on Amazon, looking particularly for ones that Ella wouldn't get her own nose or feet caught up in, and these worked great. They stay in place, allowing you to trap more than one mouse at a time.

A word of caution though; these aren't traps that you want to just leave out and forget about. They are live traps but I learned from personal experience that if you leave them in there too long, they die and soon begin to smell. They come in a two-pack.

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I might get a couple of these to put in my crawlspace, which seems to be the entry point to my house and which cannot be perfectly sealed. The Amazon videos on this product show a guy dumping maybe 20 mice at a time out of each trap. (He puts the traps in his chicken coop then drives out to the country to dump them out.) So it seems to be one of the few traps where you can catch a whole bunch at once in between being emptied. It's also meant for outdoor use, so could be submerged in a bucket of water if one were so inclined...and no poison involved. Plus you are not inhaling dust from dried poop.
 
John Brunner said:
So it seems to be one of the few traps where you can catch a whole bunch at once in between being emptied.
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I put one out upstairs and one out downstairs, and the upstairs one caught one fairly early on, then three at a time a few days later, but the downstairs one didn't catch anything, which makes sense given that our kitchen and all of our food is upstairs. That must have been it for the mice because Ella called off her vigilance and we didn't see anymore. Although this is an old house, we don't get mice unless we're away for an extended period of time. Even cats who aren't particularly vigilant can deter mice.
 
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Pretty much our cats seem to have deterred most rodents (mice, rats, squirrels) from being in our yard, which we are very thankful for. Now they are also scaring away some of the birds, which is fine, too; since the birds devour the berries as they get even close to being ripe. I do put a net over the berries as they are getting ripe, but the cats scaring them off is even better.

Jelly Bean has been catching young birds who are flying close to the back porch, where he is on guard watching for them to land. He is not eating them, but he brings the birds inside the house (squawking loudly).
He might be bringing us a present, but he does not like it when we take the bird away and let it go out the back window.

These cats love hunting, but have never actually eaten anything live, except maybe a moth or bug. I am fine with that, and don’t care if they eat it or not, as long as they are scaring them away and out of our yard.
All the birds out back were screeching and yelling “danger, danger!” To the other birds, so hopefully, the plan is working.
 
Jacqueline Lindt said:
Hubby saw a rat the other day ! 🤗

Wish I could take a photo but there not photogenic 😂

Continuing to put traps with food to try to catch them !

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We tried all kinds of traps and poison bait,, trying to get rid of the rats. Nothing worked. I think Bobby tried every kind of trap he found on YouTube as well as live traps and snap traps.
What finally helped was one winter, we had a really cold snap , and I put out food and water for the stray cats that sheltered near our house. The strays learned we had food for them , and they started coming more often. Instead of buying rat poison, we bought dry cat food and put out little warm cat beds on the porch.

Eventually , we ended up with our own cat family, which is what we have now. We keep one small window a little bit open, and that is their cat door to come in and out of the house.
No more rats in the house for months now !
Probably not so many outside either, since they have discovered the danger of being chased or caught by a prowling cat. Even squirrels are not in the yard very often now, and the birds that used to come on the back steps and eat the outside dog food are not doing that anymore.

I don’t think that our kitties are actually eating any of the rats, except for Mommy Kitty, who is a determined and skillful hunter. The kittens (now almost a year old) love the hunt, but only want to eat cooked foods, not anything live and raw, it appears, which is fine with me. I don’t care if the rats and mice live or die as long as they are not going it in our house and yard.
 
Jacqueline Lindt said:
At least there not in the house ! Will continue to try , we can't have a cat !

I haven't seen cats around so I guess the neighbours have indoor cats ☺️

We had 2 dogs but sadly they died last year of old age ....very sad time 😪 😪
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We didn’t start out having cats. If you are seeing cats around, they will spend more time hunting at your house if you start putting out some food and water for them. You won’t have to have cats of your own, just feed the strays and they will hang around and hunt the rodents.
 
Jacqueline Lindt said:
At least there not in the house ! Will continue to try , we can't have a cat !
I haven't seen cats around so I guess the neighbours have indoor cats ☺️

We had 2 dogs but sadly they died last year of old age ....very sad time 😪 😪
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Sorry about the loss of your dogs. My daughter's farm dog Roxie died as well. She was the best hunter I ever saw. Daughter could point and say KILL and it would be done. Also she could tell Roxie NO and the dog would never look at that prey again. Chickens and sheep SAFE.
 
Those of you with rodent problems could try snakes:). I think I have told the story of a landlord I had in Illinois who once ran a fish market. He had trouble with rats being near thee river. He talked to a rural mail carrier and asked if he was afraid of snakes. When the reply was "no", he asked him to catch all the black snakes he saw and put them in a burlap bag. He paid for each snake, but I don't recall how much. The snakes were released in the basement of his shop and the rodent problem vanished, and when the rats were gone, so were the snakes. He continued to put a snake or two into the basement and if there were no rats or mice, the snakes simply left. In North Carolina, we lived in an older neighborhood, and one of the large houses had fallen into disrepair and was torn down. When that house was demolished, the rats living there went into neighbor hood properties. Our kids lost the horns on their trikes since the rats chewed the plastic parts off the handlebars. We had a cat, but he just couldn't keep up and I set the snap traps until all the critters were gone, at least in our house. The neighbors took care of things in their own way.
 
Don Alaska said:
Those of you with rodent problems could try snakes:). I think I have told the story of a landlord I had in Illinois who once ran a fish market. He had trouble with rats being near thee river. He talked to a rural mail carrier and asked if he was afraid of snakes. When the reply was "no", he asked him to catch all the black snakes he saw and put them in a burlap bag. He paid for each snake, but I don't recall how much. The snakes were released in the basement of his shop and the rodent problem vanished, and when the rats were gone, so were the snakes. He continued to put a snake or two into the basement and if there were no rats or mice, the snakes simply left. In North Carolina, we lived in an older neighborhood, and one of the large houses had fallen into disrepair and was torn down. When that house was demolished, the rats living there went into neighbor hood properties. Our kids lost the horns on their trikes since the rats chewed the plastic parts off the handlebars. We had a cat, but he just couldn't keep up and I set the snap traps until all the critters were gone, at least in our house. The neighbors took care of things in their own way.
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OMG! SNAKES!!! :eek:😨 Never in a million years would I put snakes in my house. I would get me a colony of cats. Big cats! If I ever found a snake in my house I would have move or burn it to the ground. 😬
 
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