To think Alan could just kill the bloody mouse?

[Alanisadick]

Some of you may remember my thread last year (under a different name) from Alan’s kittenhood, about how the dirty little bastard kept pissing in the house, largely in reusable shopping bags. Thankfully those days are over but now I have an objectively worse problem.

Anyhoo, him and his sister Hattie have recently got into murdering things. It started with giant worms, and now what I’m getting is mice, shrews, birds and even a fucking massive frog. My wheely bin has become a morgue for the local wildlife.

Get a cat they say, then you’ll never have a problem with mice! WRONG. I never had a single mouse in the house until those two little feckers came along. And now, one of their victims escaped and has been having a rare old in my kitchen for about 3 months now. There’s mouse shit in the cupboards and drawers (thankfully not in any of the food cupboards), and recently when I opened a little used drawer, the mouse back flipped out of the drawer onto the floor and scarpered away. Proper jump scare. DD2 saw it last week sat under the boiler on the worktop.

Why those two furry little eejits don’t just kill it, I don’t know. Instead they bring me yet more mice in and murder them. Every time I find a dead one I hope it’s kitchen mouse but sadly not.

So, long story short, how do I get rid of this bastard mouse? The cats are clearly not going to help me out here. I will caveat this by saying I am quite literally petrified of mice and I’m a single parent. I know the options, old school traps, humane traps, poison. None of them sound good when you’re very scared of mice. I think poison is out because I do actually love the useless cats and don’t want to poison them. I’ve read that humane traps are actually the least humane thing to do as if you take a mouse out of its territory it will just die a horrible death. So do I have to get a Tom & Jerry style head snapper? I don’t want to but also I don’t want a mouse in the house really.

Photo of Alan for reference, he’s not quite the full ticket in his defence.

Oh and in that picture of super idiot tabby Bernard is the mouse he got me for mothers day!

Alan is fabulous!! What a beauty (and a cracking name). Loving all of the other dick cat stories too

For those of you with cats that like bringing in 'presents', there's an upcoming kickstarter being advertised atm for a cat flap that uses cameras and computer learning to lock and stop cats bringing things into the house! www.onlycat.com/

(No cats in this house due to family allergies, but there's cut cat video on the link for payment )

<skulks back into my cat-less hole to wait for more pictures>

Terrier or whippet for trouble free derodentation - I never knew what mine was up to until she had a mouse down in one in a relative's garden. We never had invasions until she died.

I had a cat.

One day in the middle of summer it brought a pigeon just outside the front door. I got the kids in and went to sort it out and it had disappeared, I assumed someone had got there first and disposed of it.

About 3 days later I started to get paranoid that my bedroom smelt. I sniffed the fabric, and then febreezed it, but it didn't go. It got to about a week or so of having this awful smell in my bedroom and I had enough so I ripped the room apart.

And there, under the bed, right under where my head laid, is a pigeon corpse, riddled with maggots.

Fucking cat had snuck it in.

Flossie approves of Alan and his mouse terrorising. Flossie is also partial to a bit of mouse entertainment. However the mouse, liking what it saw under the kitchen cupboards one day decided to move its family in and all second and third cousins.

Dh was hopeful he could gently persuade mr and mrs mouse plus their assorted relatives into the garden. Alas there were too many - the mouse catcher had to be called in.

sadly op if you are seeing mouse droppings in the kitchen and the odd mouse it isn’t the mouse Alan brought in- it’s a whole sodding village of mice. Get professional help before they apply for city status in your kitchen.

Ring doorbells wouldn't work on ours - she hides them in her mouth before letting them loose in the lounge for the evening entertainment!

Please tell Alan I love him!

I have a female hunter cat. Boy cat is useless, even if I don't see her bring it in I blame her😂

I've had birds, rats, and mice. It's always this time of year too so I'm on edge at the moment 😂. My cat flap has a curfew on it so they stay in between 10pm and 5am, I imagine she'd bring in a lot more if she went out during those times.

The most bizarre one was a crow, I'd do anything to see her getting that through the cat flap! It was half her size! It was laying dead at the bottom of the stairs, this was during lockdown so I was working from home and thought I'd deal with it later. Anyway few hours later I go to cover it with a towel so I could move it - and it sprung to life!!!! I can't believe how long it played dead there for. I literally fell back up the stairs 🤣.

A few weeks ago I went to feed my parents' cats whilst they were away and I went upstairs and found a robin chilling in their bedroom 😂. It was flying around the room very happily and I opened a window and it just sat on the windowsill for a bit then flew back inside. 🤣

Re the whippets - my mum has two whippets and two cats and still had a mouse infestation so they’re not always reliable 🤣.

So Alan’s latest dick move: I get back after a very long day yesterday and my cleaner had been. Ah lovely, nice clean house, fresh sheets on the bed. Oh wait, is that a turd on the middle of my bed? <inspects closely> nope it’s cat sick. FFS. Alan is definitely getting the blame for that one as he’s the one that spends all day lying on my bed.

Anyway, today is the day my snappy traps arrive. Never used them before. So I’ll give the snickers as bait a go, but where do I locate them? The cupboards the the mouse/mice hang out in are full of stuff, do I remove some stuff and put the traps at the back of the cupboards? Might be hard to know when they’ve caught something then as I’d have to keep taking more stuff out of the cupboards to look at them? Or just leave them on the worktop where they’re easier to see?

God you’ve just reminded me why my last cat drive me completely demented. Bringing in love mouse and letting them go.!!! Then we’d have to trap the bloody things as they were chewing through the wiring!! Complete nightmare.

we used snap traps with Mars bars in for bait.

We put the traps anywhere we’d seen the mouse droppings. As we have children they had to be tucked away in the airing cupboard and behind some wooden thing in the bathroom.

Roger that. I’m not entirely comfortable with the wanton murdering of mice as a vegetarian and animal lover but I don’t think I can cope with sharing the kitchen with mice anymore. My bf (who lives far away) is coming to visit this weekend and he does love it when I give him jobs to do, so maybe I’ll task him with the mouse murdering and hope he gets a bumper crop over the weekend.

Alan this morning…butter wouldn’t melt.

Snappy traps. We had to do it in our greenhouse as a mouse got in and was eating everything. Apparently greenhouse mice are a pest as there are no predators and it’s warm so very quickly one mouse becomes many mice. We bought plastic snap traps on Amazon, dealt with the mouse quickly and cleanly. It’s a bit wasteful but if it really is such an issue you could just put the whole thing in the bin.

UPDATE - help!!! Things on the 🐭 front have gone from bad to worse. Never mind a single mouse, never mind a village of mice, I’ve got a whole fucking city of them.

They have destroyed my oven, and then today my fridge freezer kept tripping the electrics, turns out they chewed the cable to shreds, luckily a friend replaced it for me. I have found multiple mouse carcasses around the house that the cats kindly have killed, including 2 in amongst my clothes in my chest of drawers 🤮 only found those ones when they started stinking real bad. Hard to know if they are from the kitchen family or whether they’re additional victims brought in from outside though.

The snappy traps did absolutely nothing. Loaded them up with snickers, didn’t catch a single one. I finally phoned a pest controller the other day and explained my predicament, and asked if there was any safe way to poison them without also killing my cats.

It’s like he had never encountered this conundrum before, his first suggestion was to get rid of the cats and then I could poison the mice (not actually a crazy suggestion but I do kind of like the little bastards). And then the only other thing he could suggest was to buy some plaster of Paris, mix it with flour and chocolate powder and leave a tray of the mixture somewhere on the floor. The mice would eat it and the plaster would set inside them and kill them.

Now I know that’s probably no worse than poison but it does seem pretty inhumane. Before I do that, any final ideas?

I would ring another pest controller
Know anyone with a terrier? They're usually pretty good!

Jam on the snap traps.
The mice can't dash on and grab a piece and then leg it. They have to stay to eat it and will trigger the trap - make sure they are sensitive enough by seeing if you can trigger them by a gentle prod with something other than your finger or it will be painful!

I’m not sure I know anyone who could lend me a terrier 😞. Yes maybe a different company, I phoned the local guy and he’s just a one man band, maybe a place like Rentokil would be better.

Ooh ok I’ll try again with jam. I do have a few pots lying around because I steal those little mini pots from hotel breakfasts even though no one in the house eats jam.

We use peanut butter on the Little Nipper traps. Have an old house so catch a lot of the little bastards.

If you have an attic put several up there. It's usually the place we catch the most. I think they might live up there and come down to look for food.

I don't have a dopey Alan but I do have a mouse problem. I'm in the lounge with the telly on and I can still hear the little shit gnawing in the kitchen. He had a lovely run around my lounge earlier too, while I was sat on the sofa trying to chill <shudders>

Yeah I'd go for peanut butter too. Smeared on the stick so it can't be removed.

I think traps are best at edges of rooms, which is where they tend to run. Or you can put flour down to see where the footprints are, then place your traps there.

Can you shut kids and cats out of the kitchen at night and set your traps then?

Htey hate mint too apparently, so maybe put mint essential oil on cotton wool in places. It probably won't do anything except make you feel invigorated though.

Get a plug in sonic thing, the sound drives rodents mad & makes them pack their bags & leave. Otherwise buy some cheap mice & rat killer, put behind all your kick boards in your kitchen

Years ago, my cat bought a mouse in and just left the damn thing running around the house, wee’ing and poo’ing everywhere.

well, I was walking through my kitchen one day with an armful of laundry when mouse appeared so I threw the washing on the mouse…called my daughter to help and we managed to carry the trapped mouse outside.

we released the pretty little thing in our garden and watched as it scurried away. When it’s bid for freedom was scuppered by my cat who promptly jumped on it and killed it.

im sorry this isn’t a happy ending story.

I have been in this predicament (sans cat, I must admit) and I am telling you now, snappy traps don’t work. They don’t get rid of them fast enough.

Poison is the only way.

There surely must be a cat-friendly version or some other solution.

We have also had mice and a dumb cat who can apparently hunt outside but doesn't mind mice sleeping under his settee....

Two things that helped
The hardest for you being removing the current food source. We knew they were mostly in our utility room /garage, luckily not got into kitchen cupboards. So we removed all dog food, bird food, human food from these areas. Remove all droppings

Then mouse traps with peanut butter on. They loved it. Got 3 mice in 4 days in humane traps. Thought we were sorted but then a few more droppings appeared. This mouse ignored peanut butter. Removed every last scrap of food and caught one in snap trap last night. Have cleaned up droppings and will try again. Hopefully we are done

I have thought about those sonic things but how would the mice get out of the house? Wouldn’t they just find another part of the house to live in?

@ThreeblackCats I have not saved any mice, they do seem to be thriving in the kitchen without my input though. I did however manage to save the ‘rat in a pot’ that I woke up to Alan playing with on my bedroom floor 😱. The carrier bag was from my first attempt to get it, unsuccessfully. I enlisted DD’s friend who then managed to get the rat and pot into a shoebox and then the garden.

Hahaha he looks so funny. Get a humane mousetrap. The mouse will be in it in no time and you can release it.