Awhile back we discovered we had an uninvited visitor in our home after we heard some strange noises coming from under the sink. Then late one night our little visitor ran out from behind our television to under our couch. There was no more denying it. We had left a side door open a lot for a new puppy we had, so we imagine that is how our little friends got in. I tried to look up on the Internet how to catch a mouse but had little success finding information that was useful, so I thought I would share what we discovered over the course of eliminating 2 different sets of mice from our home within a few months.
Obviously you need to set traps of some kind, because as much as they are cute, they are disease carrying rodents that leave behind lots of disgusting things for your family and especially small children to breathe in or be in contact with, so it is important to rid your house of them as soon as possible.
Since mice don’t usually respond to asking them politely to leave, believe me I have tried, you will need to trap them and dispose of them. There are many ways to do this; it is your personal choice in how to do so. Here are the options we found and the ones we liked the best.
Our Favorite: Tomcat brand Spin Trap Mouse Trap
This was the favorite of all the traps we have tried. It is basically a device that is about the size of your hand. It can go up against a wall or in a corner. It fit everywhere we wanted it to, low profile design.
How it works: It is a instant kill device. You load a space underneath with peanut butter or specially made Tomcat bait, then you spin a dial around and you turn it to “set”, this sets the dial ready to catch the mouse. There is a yellow section marked “not set” which means the trap has been triggered but it has not caught anything, usually this means you have accidentally set it off as you are setting it down or someone may have knocked it. The other red section is marked “caught” meaning you have caught something in the trap. This means that the mouse goes in, smells the bait, trips the sensor and mechanics inside and the trap spins shut much like the traditional mousetrap, causing instant death.
Pros:
*Cheaper than other brands and come two to a pack! Trust me you will be glad you have it.
*Instantly eliminated, no suffering like some other traps.
*Safe for kids and pets. You can’t get your fingers into the trap or hurt yourself because everything is inside and around the bend of this device.
*No Visual Contact- Meaning once you have a dead mouse, you just pick it up and dispose of. You don’t have to see the animal at all or risk children or pets seeing the dead animal. It is the best part of this trap.
*Easy to use and easy to dispose of.
Tomcat-Live Catch Traps
We bought one of these and found that it worked better than we thought. It is a simple device that counteracts from the weight of the mouse when it enters the trap smelling the bait you put inside. Once the weight shifts, the front end flips down to close the door, effectively trapping the mouse inside the small square tube without a way out. You then can take the mouse to a field somewhere and let it free. It is fairly inexpensive and comes one in a pack and technically can be used over and over again.
Pros: *Nicest, most humane way of eliminating mouse from your home, except you just need to remember to check the traps every day or else you may not be treating it in the most humane way if you forget about it.
*Safe for kids and pets because there is nothing on or in this device to make it a danger.
*Great Value for the price. Since you can use over and over again.
*Easy to use.
*No visual contact: Once again you don’t have to make contact with the animal, except seeing it dart out upon release like a bolt of lightning, trust me, be ready.
*They also have a version of this trap that can collect up to 10 mice at once!
Here are other alternatives, available at Stores, but not recommended:
Glue Boards/Traps/Trays
These have worked in the past for me, but not recently to catch the ones that were tormenting us. I actually saw one that had a lot of mouse fur on it. Meaning that the mouse either kept on walking over it because they dry out over awhile or because he freed himself. Not to mention the traps are not very humane, giving the animals a slower painful death than instant kill methods. The animal may starve to death or chew off a limb to free himself.
Wooden Mouse Snap Traps-
These are your traditional quick kill devices for eliminating mice, the old standard. They are quick and efficient, but are unsafe to have around pets or children. You can’t avoid seeing the animal after its death in order to dispose of it.
Bait Station- There is also Bait stations that you can set out and the mouse can collect the bait and go home to the nest and die, but in some situations, this is not what you want, because you don’t want a rotting dead mouse in your house that you can’t find. This would be more appropriate I would think on a farm or larger compound that would have more of this common problem.
Lastly there is a quick strategy that we tried without having any of these devices on the night we discovered or mouse visitor. You can create a trap at home. You just need a small bucket or basket of some kind. You use cardboard to make a ramp for the mouse, you set it near the wall’s edge and make the ramp go up to a wastebasket of some size. Then you will need a tube, the best being a paper towel tube. You will need to bend it slightly so the mouse will be able to run through it to the bait (we used peanut butter) at the end of the tube. Therefore when the animal runs up the ramp, through the roll of toilet paper, the weight of the mouse will force the tube that is not supported down, which will launch the mouse into the basket of whatever you have in the wastebasket. You will have to either be right there next to it, to keep in, or you can have a bucket of soapy water that the mouse would drown into in the night that it is captured. (This is not recommended at all)
Whichever way you decide to catch your mouse, make sure to clean up all droppings after you leave, this will make for a much healthier house, but also for the next time you think you have a mouse, you will be able to detect new droppings. Also make sure you check the traps several times a day if you can, so that you can dispose of the animals as soon as you can.
