MOUSE IN THE HOUSE

[WineLover21]

We've got a mouse in the house.

I'm TERRIFIED! How do I get rid of it asap!? It's even coming out in the day!!!!!

We have a cat. The only help it has been is to catch a mouse outside and bring it in (still alive). Not much of a help with mice already inside!

DH says we need a better cat...

Remove the kick board. Shine a light under there check for mouse droppings. And also any holes even tiny ones
Use wire wool and expanding foam. Where there are any pipes that come into the house for the washing machine , kitchen sink etc where the pipes go in/out . Put wire wall in them gaps tightly and add expanding foam. Do the same outside on any pipes . Also check for any holes outside as well. Even tiny ones. Also cover air vents by using wire grills double it if you need to. Make sure air can still get in. But make sure a pencil can't get through.

Use snap traps with a tiny bit of peanut butter litterly a tiny smear.

😂👏🏼

Thank you! This has been such a helpful thread. I'm too terrified to pull the board off incase a hoard of them come running at me Ratatouille style!

I also darent ask if they can get up to our bedrooms! 😭

OP, do get a cat if you can afford it and like them. I have a semi feral bruiser and he made our annual mouse invasion (rental in a run down victorian flat in London) disappear. I'm irrationally terrified of them, it's been such a relief!

@oakleaffy Glue traps ARE illegal, thankfully. I wish Amazon would stop selling them

The very small one I saw was in my bedroom one night (loft conversion)! It was pest control who informed me that it was highly unlikely that it had entered upstairs and tracked the entry points to behind the kitchen kickbacks under the sink.

Ha ha! We were renovating a house a couple of years ago, lots of holes in walls etc. Hubby woke me in the middle of the night with a whisper & said “look at my knee”. There was a little mouse sat there eating a biscuit crumb 😆😆. As I sat up, it ran off & went under the bed. So I rolled over & went back to sleep.

They can climb pipes! They'll travel inside the walls if they can, especially if there is any food up there.

Our infestation last winter, one brave one popped out from where the radiator pipe goes into the floor in my daughter's bedroom <shudder>

She woke up and it was in her bin where she had put an apple core 🤣

Not to mention the one that ran over my foot underneath my electric blanket 😬

I hate to break it to you all, but...

Mice are ubiquitous and there is hardly a house, garage, office, factory or anywhere else occupied, or used, by humans where mice are not present - whether you are aware of them or not!

I believe mice are crepuscular- most active at dawn and dusk.

For sure! I live in a tenement flat and have had mice on and off for years. I know there is a large hole in the wall where the drain pipe goes out and the mice come in, I can't reach it because of fitted units and so there is nothing I can do to diminish the steady stream of mice that usually find nothing to eat in my kitchen and move on.

As far as traps go, I find the snap traps more than not tend to fail to snap and serve as tiny feeding stations, electronic zappers had a limited success until they sussed what they were. In fact the only traps that did work were the humane ones, they were quite happy to go in there, but then you have to take them on a walk to the park and surreptitiously empty them out of your pockets, and thank you but I'd rather not.

Recently they little buggers got into a drawer unit and feasted themselves on some pea pasta, ryvita and a snickers bar. When they have been less lucky in foraging they have ripped up plastic bags and some washing up sponges. I was advised to soak cotton balls in peppermint oil but later discovered the balls themselves had disappeared no doubt making a minty soft lining to the mice's nests. I've tried to put them off by using highly scented products to clean with but I think that they are less bothered by the fruity flowery stink than I am.

Just now we have a population explosion on the back of the pea pasta debacle and definitely have some juveniles judging by the size of the mouse poos. So yes, tenements do have mice, and if anyone says their tenement flat doesn't have them has just not spotted them yet.

I’ve had one mouse in the house before but I think we brought it back from a festival. It appeared after we got back from the festival, put our bags down and went out to the supermarket. Later that night I saw it running about. Next day I left the back door open and went out. It left and never came back.
Another house we lived in and found two. Set a trap and caught the first one. Never caught the other but in the meantime we got a kitten. We told the landlord about the mice and he washed his hands of it. When we left he complained about mice in the house and to be fair what did he expect when we took the cat away.

The reason you could catch it is because your cat had injured it. It would have been kinder to kill it than let it go. They are very fast normally, you’d have no chance of catching a healthy mouse with a tea towel.

@user8634216758

I really don't think it was injured. It was downstairs when it escaped from the cats, and when I caught it the following day it was upstairs in the bedroom - so it had managed to climb the stairs!

You are right that they are fast, but they go on vibrations - they can't see you if you don't move. It took a couple of attempts (it kept popping out and then darting back under the bookcase when I moved), but eventually it wandered right over to my foot on its own. Poor thing was probably desperately looking for food.

Also, sometimes mice will freeze, rather than run, so you can just chuck something over them.

Yes house mice populations are good, but tell that to a barn owl in the winter who just wants to eat.l to stop it from starving which is quite likely due to a lack of food availability.

@PlantHeadNo5 I agree. For this reason, if my cat kills a mouse I usually put it outside for somebody else to eat. They always disappear very quickly and I prefer to think that they died for a purpose!

Well, we have a healthy population of owls, raptors, foxes etc. Every time I chuck a mouse over the hedge it gets eaten. You should see the number of Red Kites that follow the harvesters around. No lack of mousey snacks in our neck of the woods.

What about rats?
Cockroaches?
Mosquitos?
Blue bottles?
If I lived in a region where there were scorpions or snakes, should I think twice about killing them in my house?

My entire neighbourhood was infested with mice in early summer when a big public building was demolished. Mice carry disease. The insistence that they're harmless and cute is a puzzling denial of that fact.

The local hawks and coyotes are not going to starve any time soon.

On top of thousands of mice, they also have legions of rabbits, squirrels, and chipmunks to eat. Plus lots of birds (because people here don't let their cats roam).

Nature is everywhere, even inside buildings unless you live in an airtight container.

Or, the cats took it upstairs.

Unfortunately these don’t work. Someone put a nocturnal video up of an empty room/garage and after a couple of days the mice were completely ignoring it and were right by it - such a disappointment as I thought these were a really great idea.

Cats are also hit and miss as they can actually bring live ones into the house and don’t always kill them.

We started off with humane traps - which worked.The only thing is if you want it to be truly humane you need to release them within an hour or so or it stresses them out(!) so we were having to drive out to the middle of the countryside at night to release. They say they can find their way back within a surprising number of miles, I don’t think this is true personally but we wanted to play it safe as we’d gone to all that trouble. After doing this several times - we live in the countryside and we think they got in through open back door at the end of the summer, and then small gap under the door - we decided snap traps were sadly the more expedient option. And though it was awful seeing their little faces when they’d been caught, they did work. We got some under door attachments and fixed the hole under the back door. You live in fear that they will somehow return as they can cause a hell of a lot of damage and wreak havoc on your mental health so I do sympathise. Hope you get your problem sorted.

edited for typos

A rodent that has been caught by a cat will 100% be injured, and will almost certainly succumb to the bacterial infection from teeth/claws eventually. Maybe several days later, but no happy ending for mr mouse I'm afraid, unless you’re going to give it antibiotics!

But, what you are describing, it walking to your foot, is exactly how they behave if they’ve ingested poison - Slower, like they can’t see, no fear of anything. I definitely wouldn’t be releasing a slow rodent thats been poisoned as caught by a bird of prey can have dreadful consequences to the food chain.

We had cats, they bought the mice in to play with.

Same. Sometimes they kill them, or they die of shock, then we get either a whole mouse, or bits of one, to pick up.

One of our cats is an excellent mouser. The other is not.

The excellent mouser brings in live mice to teach the shit mouser to catch them.

Shit mouser is not learning! She plays with it for a bit, then gets distracted and looks away, and the mouse runs off! Unfortunately at this point, decent mouser has normally wandered off, so the mouse ends up just running around the house looking for a place to hide, only to be discovered again later.

Thankfully we now know the telltale suspicious activity signs in our cats to know we've got a live one knocking around.

If you're trying to catch a live one, I can recommend long handled dustpan and brushes, particularly the ones with the pan that swings up when you lift it up. We had a dedicated mouse catching one and can usually catch and release a mouse within a couple of minutes of being aware of its presence.

I close off as many doors as possible to try and contain it in one room, preferably one with an exterior door. Open the exterior door, so that it has the option to take itself out, or you have a quick route out yourself if you do catch it!

If you have a cat, take it to a bush somewhere and drop it in there to give it chance to recover and scurry away. If you don't have a cat, just chuck it out the door and shut the door quickly!

The worst one I had was the catch and release of a traumatised mouse that had been stuck under our bin all night. Then only to have to rescue it for a second time when the cat had sneakily been watching me and went and caught the poor thing again!

We don't have a healthy population of a number of owl species in the U.K.