Humane mouse trap, advice please

[Rubyupbeat]

Just that really.
We have a mouse in the kitchen (luckily not a rat) all food is contained, dogs lick their bowls clean and their bowls are washed straight after. No idea where its food source is coming from. I am saying it, hoping it's only an 'it'
There is no way I can put down anything to harm it, so need advice on any humane traps that have been successful to you.
Many thanks in advance .

A rat is slightly more cognitively capable than a mouse, but I know more about them than I do about house nice, so I'll use them as an example. Look into the research on the psychology of rats. There's a hell of a lot more to it than you seem to think — each rat is a member of a rat society, running around smelling the trails of individual other rats they know as individuals, gaining information about those rats' hormonal and emotional state, garnering information about what's safe to eat from what they can smell on other rats, developing complex mental maps of their area, forming alliances and reciprocal social arrangements with other rats… these are not tiny soulless interchangeable survival machines. A town rat plucked from its society and environment and dumped in the countryside is in much the same predicament as a Londoner picked up and dumped in a random forest somewhere.

Yes. As someone who has previously owned and loved many pet mice and rats, and who cares about animal welfare, I would prefer to quickly and cleanly kill a house mouse than capture it and release it in a hedgerow.

I am not sure these human analogies are really having the right effect as I think most of us would choose to be dumped in a forest rather than killed!

@GrrrlPwr

So you would prefer to kill them? Unreal.

I think you are rather missing the point which is to do as you suggest kills them anyway. Just more slowly and more terrifyingly.

Is that how you would prefer to kill them? Unreal

I think that given most of the wild animal organisations suggest that people use humane traps where possible to suggest that to use a humane trap is going to lead to the slow death of a mouse is clearly bollocks.

However, they rarely work, and if you have one you likely have more.

Years ago we had a mouse in the garage. My DS was horrified at the thought of killing it so we bought some humane traps,and one night when my then DH got home he went in to discover that there was a mouse in one of them. However, the mouse appeared to be dead, so he went outside to put it in the outside bin. As soon as he opened the trap again the mouse legged it. That was the only mouse we caught in the trap, and after that we bought quick kill ones which worked quickly.

I'm not trying to argue one way or the other whether it's preferable for a human to be killed than to be abandoned alone and defenceless in a hostile and unfamiliar environment. I'm saying that doing that to a small animal that doesn't think like we do is crueller than quickly killing it.

I think that people don't understand that what they're doing to the animal is unpleasant — they think the house mouse is scampering off to a bucolic life in the fields nibbling acorns and blackberries. When actually it's being deposited into a very stressful, very probably unsurvivable situation.

Humane traps are fine for mice brought in from outside by cats as these are usually wood mice (as long as the mouse hasn’t been injured, in which case putting kitchen roll over it and hitting it with a brick is preferable to release). But for house mice, it’s futile. You’ll never get rid of them that way and they will die outside anyway. Glue traps and poison are incredibly cruel. Snap traps are the way to go.

Yep good point, an outdoor mouse that really didn't want to be in your house in the first place can be returned outside.

The old ‘break back’ traps are painless.
If you keep your fingers out the way when setting them. 😉

I think that given most of the wild animal organisations suggest that people use humane traps where possible to suggest that to use a humane trap is going to lead to the slow death of a mouse is clearly bollocks.

What wild animal organisations are recommending live trap and outdoor release for house mice living in a house? The only reason I can imagine they'd argue for that is to provide an easy square meal for a wild bird of prey.