I made the mistake of keeping a bag of bird feed under my kitchen sink which means I have at least one mouse coming into the house now. In another place I lived I used the traditional snapper trap as there were many mice and they were causing damage. I killed 9 mice but felt pretty bad about it.

This time I bought live traps which didn’t work so got lent one last night which did work. I was pleased to have finally caught a mouse without killing it so drove about 3 miles to some woods to release it only to find it had died in the trap.

So instead of killing it quickly with a snapper trap I scared it to death with a live trap. Now I’m wondering, does this happen a lot? Am I better off just using the traditional snapper trap?

I had them in the house too, came in through the garage, up the stench pipe boxing into the bathroom joists, across the underfloor, down the gap between a first floor wall and the plasterboard round the inside of the wall and out of the hole where the kitchen sink drain goes through the wall and down the washing machine pipe to the dogs food bowl
WTF !! Took me ages to fathom out until I heard scratching in the wall in the downstairs loo
Talk about Mission Impossible mice
Anyway 8 traps 6 snappers( the black plastic ones ) and two of the humane ones
All were caught in the snappers all 11 of them 😯
That is all 😆

The traditional mouse trap is very quick and humane. Mice are very resourceful and once they find a food source will keep coming back. Very sad but destroying them is the only real option.

No point in using a live trap – what are you going to do with them afterwards – they will either get back into your house, into someone elses house or die.

Well I went to somewhere remote to release it. Some walkers asked me what I was doing so I told them. I felt a bit stupid when I opened the trap and the dead mouse slid out.

Did you pretend you were giving it a proper funeral? Ask them to form a guard of honour?

Mice are vermin so unless you want to share your home with them snap dead traps every time

We had terrible mice in the flat (old 19th century edinburgh tenement, you can hear them scuttling around between the ceiling and the upstairs floor) and they even grew wise to a variety of traps, then someone suggested filling all the tiny holes we could find with aluminium foil, and bingo, instantly we had no mice. They won’t chew through the aluminium foil for some reason, even though they will chew through floorboards and plaster. Have only had a mouse once in about 2 years since.

had a funny storey about a mouse! there was this god awful smell in the bathroom which didnt seem to want to go away and was graduly getting worse, anyway i acused my misus of having bad guts and probably blocked up the toilet with her excesive toilet paper use. anyway she accused me of the bad stink etc etc, after many bottles of bleach and plunging etc and no difference and our toilet smelling of roses, the stink remained. so we pulled apart the bathroom and found the rotting corpse of a mouse under the bath, couldnt figure out how it got in as was sealed bath panel, maybe sqeezed through a gap next to a pipe.
Anyway, kill them you really dont want rotting mice all round the house.

the don’t like it as it reacts with their fillings…
or wire wool, they don’t like chewing through that.
but they’ll probably just take a different route instead.
until you have a house made of alu foil and wire wool.

Kill em, then stick their corpses on cocktail sticks at likely entrances as a warning to other mice. It’s the only way they’ll learn.

Well I went to somewhere remote to release it. Some walkers asked me what I was doing so I told them. I felt a bit stupid when I opened the trap and the dead mouse slid out.

That made me laugh out loud.

Only needs a finger sized hole to let a mouse in. Unfortunately and from experience, poison and snappers is the only way to remove unwanted mice quickly.

By saying live traps I thought you meant a cat!

We had problems with mice, there was a nest in the building across the way. Although they only ever came into our house after having a lift from our cat. Usually found them spread over the kitchen floor in the morning. Not the best thing to step in when you’ve got nout on your feet.

Call me a heartless bastard but I have no problem with killing mice or rats. I have got at least 4 mice by stalking them with a hammer in my hand. The last one I got was a fast bugger so I ended up stamping on it.

Last year in France, the gite I stayed in had a humane trap. One night while watching telly the trap went off, Mrs. Stavro sh4t herself and I then had to release an angry shrew. Unfortunately I had been feeding the owners chickens with our stale baguettes all week so the minute the shrew was freed the chickens got it. Moral is, humane is b*ll*cks.

The traps set again. A mouse will be getting a free bike ride in the morning if I catch one.

Want to borrow our cat? Fantastic little mouser – give him 2 minutes in a room with a mouse and he’ll be beating it to death with his paw until it’s eye pops out. Talking of which I’ve got a couple of mice outside to clean up in the morning.

He’s a little schizophrenic though as I’ve never seen a more snuggly cat. Every night he comes upstairs and has to sleep with a paw touching Kates hand all night but then runs outside in the morning to try and catch the huge rabbit at the end of the orchard that he’s been after for a couple of months but it’s bigger than he is. I swear he has been eyeing up the deer too and one of the lambs got a bop on the nose this morning when it tried to chase him.

We were getting mice in to the cold pantry, which were then having a good old explore of the kitchen, dining room and airing cupboard. My wife set a number of humane traps and never caught a thing, so I got an electonic rat killer trap thingy, we put them both in the cold pantry and the mice went for death every time. We used the same bait and set them on their own on alternate nights in exactly the same location, no matter what the humane one was always empty.

Saying that the humane traps always catch the mice in the garage.

Just to add some balance:

We used live catch traps to catch & release a family of 9 mice that were raiding our house last summer.
All mice survived, scurried away happily and haven’t been back since.

The cheap black plastic “tip traps” (B&Q) worked very well combined with Big Cheese Mouse Bait

The other thing to do is remove food sources (we put everything in the pantry into glass or plastic containers) and block every hole you can find (use wire wool and expanding foam: they can’t bite through the wire).

Want to borrow our cat?

Would love to but my landlady is anti cat. Would certainly solve the problem by the sound of it.

GrahamS – Member

That’s the trap I got lent that the mouse died in. I think it must have got scared to death. Bit of a shame really as it would have suffered less with a snapper trap.

Yeah mice are prone to getting scared to death: tiny fast-beating hearts. 🙁
You have to keep them quiet and dark, and try to either release them fairly promptly (i.e. the morning you find them) or transfer them to a box with some food and somewhere to hide (e.g. leave them in the trap with the door off it and put the whole thing in a box with some shredded paper).

All 9 of ours survived that treatment.

Also don’t forget to switch off any ultrasonic mouse repellents. Bit unfair to trap them where they’re being blasted by one of those all night.

We had a rat problem when they relaid a huge stretch of drains and soakaways in the village. The local ratcatcher dispelled any myths re humane traps – his advice was that unless you are going to release mice caught into someone elses house you may as well kill it, because when released out in the fields they will die very quickly. Did consider donating them to a irritating neighbour via their letterbox.

Mr ratter’s choice for catching rats was adhesive pads, the rat gets stuck and then he despatched them with a spade. Poison just leaves a rotting rat corpse somewhere nearby.

Mr ratter’s choice for catching rats was adhesive pads

Can’t really think of a much crueller way to “humanely” kill animals 🙁

Humane traps are quite useful, at least you know what you’ve got unlike poison – just dump them in a bucket of water afterwards.

Next door neighbour started laying home-made glue traps a while back; sheets cut from a cereal box smeared with some sort of thick sticky glue. I know this as they kept appearing in my house still attached to my cat.

Three figure sum in vet bills, that cost me. Berk.

I honestly can’t believe that some people have a problem killing mice. It was a shock to read the op’s post, and I actually thought I had mis understood until I read it again. You live and learn , eh? Each to their own.

Oh no. Were they attached to it’s face? Hope the cat was ok.

You live and learn , eh?

I prefer “Live and let live” 😉

Can’t really think of a much crueller way to “humanely” kill animals

Better than using warfarin which is an anticoagulant and used in such strength that it causes them to hemorrhage internally and die far more slowly. It’s just not as visceral because it goes away, out of sight, to die.

Not really keen on killing anything unless it poses a risk.

I honestly can’t believe that some people have a problem killing mice.

I don’t have a huge problem with killing them. Like I said I have killed them before and will again if I have to I’d just rather not that’s all.

We had a rat problem when they relaid a huge stretch of drains and soakaways in the village. The local ratcatcher dispelled any myths re humane traps – his advice was that unless you are going to release mice caught into someone elses house you may as well kill it, because when released out in the fields they will die very quickly.

I wouldn’t turn to a ratcatcher to ‘dispell any myths re human traps’. A wild animal unable to survive in the wild? If so at least it would get eaten by another animal like possibly a barn owl which are struggling anyway.

just dump them in a bucket of water afterwards.

You’d get into trouble with the RSPCA doing that.

I wouldn’t turn to a ratcatcher to ‘dispell any myths re human traps’.

Ditto.

I’ve had this out with “experts” on here before who claimed it is crueller to catch and release a mouse because they can’t survive in the wild. 😯 I seriously doubt this is true, even for “house mice”, certainly doesn’t fit with online information about mice.

As you say, if they do end up as food for the local kestrel or owl population then that’s a good thing anyway and a bit more of a “constructive” end than just being thrown in the bin.