MOUSE IN THE HOUSE!!!!!!!!

[spikeycat]

My lovely cat (the swine) has dropped a live mouse in the house which I found today when I pulled out the pc besk to hoover behind it. I screamed (typical woman!) and it has ran under the huge sofa I have in hear. I don't know how to get it out and I can't relax till its gone - Help

[spikeycat]

Thought about that but that would feel a bit mean, plus he has gone out to play now

[Jenie]

Tell any child over the age of 4 that you have a mouse under your sofa, give them a shoe box and the promise of ice creams if they catch it...... could be the next big thing in party games.....

[Jenie]

Tell any child over the age of 4 that you have a mouse under your sofa, give them a shoe box and the promise of ice creams if they catch it...... could be the next big thing in party games.....

[Jenie]

oops sorry

[alibubbles]

If it is till there when your cat comes back, he'll soon find it and stake it out. I quite often come down in the morning and find my 3 cats lined up watching the underneath of the washing machine in the laundry room or under the dresser.

Gruesome, but if it doesn't you'll eventually find it flat and dried somewhere when you pull furniture ut again. I found three under the dresser, they don't smell as we didn't know they were there.

Wait till your cat brings in a weasel, chasing one of those up and down the curtains is like something out of a disney film. I caught it in the end, it went upstairs and I literally tore DD's bedroom apart going frantic. I caught it in a shoebox and it kept trying to jump out with the lid on!

[Dahlia]

Do you have any mousetraps? We get in our back porch sometimes and we used to get them when I was a child - they are seriously hard to catch unless you put a trap down or poison. A trap kills them instantly so I think its kinder. Depends how tough you are! If you do use a trap though, put a piece of bread on rather than cheese.

[musica]

You can get humane mousetraps, which we have used very successfully - they trap them in a little box, and then you can release the mouse. The best bait is peanut butter (!), and they honestly do work! They're not expensive either, but much nicer for the mouse, who gets to live to fight another day.

[donnie]

the only good rodent is a DEAD ONE !!!!!

[Blu]

yes, Humane Traps are very humane indeed: out it runs, and then comes back the next night for a second helping of bait! I was demonstrating my humane trap to my sister, and didn't realise there was a mouse inside. It moved, I shrieked and dropped the trap (from quite a height)and my sister said "well i don't think it's very humane if you're going to break it's bones and give it a heart attack"! I'm afraid I'm a killer-trap user now. I actually quite like mice, and feel sorry about it, but they do shed urine continually as they run, and with a toddler.....

[musica]

Well, we had about 6 mice in the house, and we caught them all, and none have come back, so I do think they're effective.

[SamboM]

You can get a sonic vermin scaring device in Robert Dyas and prob most hardware stores. It make a noise inaudible to humans which rats and mice hate. Can get for one room only or whole house I believe.

[SamboM]

You can get a sonic vermin scaring device in Robert Dyas and prob most hardware stores. It make a noise inaudible to humans which rats and mice hate. Can get for one room only or whole house I believe.

[Jimjams]

Ahhh fond memories- spent years catching mice. The humane traps are good for the odd mouse or two, but not an infestation. Set them right against a wall (no gaps between the side and the wall) as that's where mice run.

If you have a bad infestation then poisoning is horrible but effective for mice. have to keep it away from children though obviously. I tried to catch mice from a site that had been infested until 3 days previously when the farmer had laid poison. They had all gone. NOw rats that's a diferent matter.

Just a thought - if the cats brought it in it could be a wood mouse. They're a bit bigger and have large eyes. They're sweet and don't infest houses so it's nice to release them.

[Jimjams]

here we go- cute piccy of a wood mouse

stockscotland.com/index2.html

[Blu]

Musica, are you sure it wasn't the same mouse 6 times? just kidding: ideally i would start with a humane trap. I probably didn't take it far enough away. It was a distinctive little fellow, so I think it was the same one that returned.

JimJams, how DO you deal effectively with rats (and how come you're so knowledgable about them!!!)? I moved out of my last house which was by a railway line because rats kept coming in and gnawing things (like fruit, and my christmas pudding). Poisoning was DISASTROUS: they died under the floorboards, and after taking up the whole floor to try and locate the smell, I still couldn't find the body and ended up with a nightmare Hitchcock-style invasion of bluebottles. And I never managed to catch one in a trap despite following all the advice from the council pest man.

[Jimjams]

Rats are a nightmare to get rid of. Really. I did see a trap once on a farm which was a kind of guilotine. There were 4 rat bodies sticking out and the farmer said "they don't get out of that." yuck yuck yuck. Luckily I never had to deal with rats- just came across them on mouse searches. I did my Phd (yawn) on a population of mice in northern Scotland - they have a different number of chromosomes than normal mice (double yawn), so spent rather a lot of time driving round Caithness and Sutherland crawling around farms catching mice. If you get a real infestation you can catch them up your trousers! There were a couple of farms like that.

[Jimjams]

Apart from trousers we used Longworth traps to catch the mice. They're like a big version of the live mammal traps discussed earlier. They're pretty good for catching mice (you just don't want a weasel in one- nasty vicious brutes).

[spikeycat]

well, the cat came home, sniffed the sofa, thought about trying to catch it and then buggered off up stairs to sleep on my bed. DP came home at lunch and we managed to get it. It wasn't a mouse though, it was a shrew! Remember the thread a few weeks ago where I wrote about ds picking up a dead one and waving it at me?

Bloody cat

[Jimjams]

ahh shrews are easy to catch- just offer them a piece of raw meat- they'll go for it every time......

[hmb]

Wow you had all the fun jobs Jimjams!

A cousin was employed by the council as a rat catcher. I asked him what poison he would recommend and he said a baseball bat. Apparantly they never become resistant to a baseball bat.

Have no second thoughts about getting rid of rats as swiftly as possible. They are dirty and spread any number of diseases. Contact your local council and get them to do it for you. And try to make sure that there are no easily available sources of food for them to get at. Not always easy I realise, but double bag your rubbish etc and check that sewerage pipes and the like are free from breakages.

[Linnet]

When I first met my husband the flat that he lived in had a mouse. I never actually saw it but one night I was in the flat alone and I could hear it raking around in the bin. After that I made him go out and buy a mouse trap.

We put chocolate in it, since mice love chocolate, and in the end we caught 8 of the little blighters. 4 big ones and 4 little ones. Ever since then I've had a fear of getting mice in the house.

Another (rented)flat I stayed in at one point was an attic flat and sometimes at night or in the morning we could hear something running around in the ceiling. Dh was convinced that it was a rat. It was terrifying. I would come home from work and open the door very slowly convinced that I would find this rat sitting in my living room looking at me. We were in the process of moving house and I was so glad when we finally went.

[Lisa78]

Be grateful - my cat once brought a frog in...
Try catching one of them buggers, ugliest things on planet!

[ninja]

we had a magpie yesterday - the kitchen was a mess afterwards and the cat looked like he regretted this - dead mouse today. Normally he loses them but they somehow find a way out (well I think they do)

[honeybunny]

We regularly have a mouse or shrew living under our sofa in our conservatory. If I have the time or inclination I catch it (used to be by hand, but got bitten by a mouse that had a cat ahold of it and neither would let go... v painful, so now its usually a beaker)and release it to be caught again, usually within a few minutes. If I'm feeling more cynical, I'll call the cat, lift the sofa and watch nature do its thing. Only this time I push the cat outside to do the deed. Children think its great entertainment!