Problem with mice!

Mary Stetler said:
Sadly, possums also kill chickens.
I forgot a rather good trap for mice in the barn. i have a manure bucket, about half full of water under a leak in the pole building roof. During dry times, it has many mice a-floating. Don't know why they go there instead of the chicken water.
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Dead opossums kill nothing! :ROFLMAO: Sometimes the only way to control mice is to trap them, that's for sure.
 
Cats do seem like the perfect solution to mice. Of course, the more accustomed they become to having meals brought out to them, the less efficient they become. When I was letting my cats outside, I have had them carrying live (and apparently healthy) mice into the house and letting them go, and this even include Bird, a cat I took in as a feral adult. After a few years, she quit eating her prey, and they became playthings and, in some cases, perhaps playmates, although I will say that the mice didn't seem to be having fun.
 
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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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John Brunner said:
Getting rid of mice outdoors is tough. Poison might kill things that eat the poisoned mice. Snap Traps might injure any critter that tries to take the bait.

Every few years I get one or two in the house and I use Snap Traps. Another idea for outdoors is a bucket trap. I grabbed this vid at random:


If you put water in it, they just drown. Lots of different variations on You Tube. You can also buy kits that go on a gallon bucket:


When you put water in the bucket, the idea is to make it deep enough that they have to tread water to keep their heads up, and eventually they tire and drown. If you fill it too high, they can grab the rim of the bucket and pull themselves out. Some folks add antifreeze for a quick kill, but then you got other critters to worry about.
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Bucket traps work on most rats & mice. But some are smarter than others. I got one rat with this bucket trap, but when I reset it, I was astonished to find this. A rat actually walked around the edge of the lid, avoiding the part that drops him into the bucket & chewed through the plastic in the front that covers the bait & ate the peanut butter, then walked away - probably laughing
This is how the trap works.
 

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If rats are the problem, a weasel trap might be needed. We have ermine problems with chickens and eggs here during the winter, and theye seem to be too smart for regular traps, so you make a box trap similar to a trap that is used to live-trap rabbits but made of wood as the inside has to be totally dark. For ermine, a can of tuna or cat food is opened and placed at the back of the trap. The front of the trap has a small hole to allow admittance, but the regular rat trap is placed against the front of the box under the hole and the ermine is caught when trying to exit in the dark.
 
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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We have used those, and the best way to dispose of the trapped mice is to drop the trap into a bucket of water. If left alone, the mice will eat each other until there is only one and that one will starve.
 
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