Dad, we have a mouse!

Two weeks ago my son came home from college to have lunch with me and his Mom. He’s running late and sends a text, “trying to catch a mouse.” One of the guys he shares an apartment with saw a mouse and wanted help catching it. They failed to catch it. My son was rather adamant they wanted the mouse gone.

After lunch we head to Wal-Mart to pick up some stuff so we look at mouse traps. I like the old spring-loaded style that tends to go off in your hand. He picked out a model that was easy to set and non-threatening to his fingers. I tell him to bait it with some peanut butter.

Characters involved with this are my-boy, farm-boy, guitar-boy and a student from Saudi Arabia. The guy from Saudi was involved in the original search but not involved any further. Farm-boy grew up on a dairy farm.

So, my son goes back to school after our Wal-Mart trip and sets two traps baited with peanut butter, one in the laundry room and one in the kitchen. An hour later farm-boy decides the traps aren’t strong enough to kill a mouse. He takes the traps up, cleans off the peanut butter, and leaves the unset traps on the counter in the kitchen.

Later in the evening guitar-boy is playing around with the traps and leaves one ‘set’ on the kitchen counter. Everyone goes to bed.

When they get up in the morning the trap has caught/killed a mouse. Over the next couple days they get two more.

The apartment they live in is brand new. An exterminator was sent out to investigate. He found a large hole in the wall where the washing machine plumbing comes through the wall. This has been fixed.

No mice have been seen for several days now.

Just thought I would share. Only 316 words. WTF?

 

College kids are a lot more mature now it seems........when I was rooming with three other guys the mouse traps would have been in beds, drawers, next to the beer in the frij........anywhere but where the mouse would be.

 

They are lucky that these mice fell for the trap...lots of them don't.

We tried the glue trap one time and the mouse had three feet on the trap but one was free. He pushed the trap through the kitchen, livingroom, down the corrider, through the bedroom and finally expired from exhaustion in the bathroom. I went to the bathroom the next morning and was one second from stepping on the dead mouse and ultimately having my foot get stuck to his dead body. Fortunately something made me pause right before the fatal step. I cannot imagine what I would have done if indeed I did make contact with the body.

 

......that would have led to some serious new dance moves !

 

Gross! A Dead Mouse on the Kitchen Counter top
Trying to get that image out of my head. Ewwww!

 

Yeah, I moved into a new condo about 20 years ago and mice had chewed a hole into the unit in the back of my walk-in closet. I also got them with pb on a spring trap. New construction will destroy many small rodent homes and roaming areas in laying the foundation and, well, sometimes 'guests' come in. Nothing to do with cleanliness, just loss of habitat.

 

And now that the weather is turning cooler, mice are looking for food and shelter, they don't need much. We had a minor issue a few years ago and I went with the glue traps, works like a charm.

 

I agree. A mouse trap makes for endless hours of sabotage and buffoonery. never gets old.

 

Our cats are highly-trained ninja assassins! Mice cringe in fear at just the sight...

No, our cats just sit and watch the mice. The lazy bums!
Sometimes they inadvertently corner the mouse and I can corral it and remove it to the distant outdoors.

RICHARD

 

A long, long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away) I was a manager for a retail outlet. I was walking in the warehouse taking inventory when all of a sudden I stepped on a glue rat trap (the big mouse). There was a 3 ft. long rat (ok I embellish) that was stuck in the trap and still alive. Both he and myself were terrified out of our wits and his twisting and turning made me think he was trying to bite my leg.

Lots of screaming and M.C. Hammer and Michael Jackson moves later I managed to fling the trap off of my foot, much to the howls of laughter from my fricken subordinates.....

 

After one visit back in 2002, I now avoid Disneyworld at all costs. The mice there are huge, walk on their hind legs, and dress real fancy! Some scary s#it indeed!

RICHARD

 

Shoulda rented out your houseboy for a couple of nights. He'd of caught it and just grinned. From the top of the ladder probably.

 

We had mice a few weeks ago. Those electronic traps are pretty good, I would recommend them.

What I wouldn't recommend are glue traps. Okay, so you've caught the mouse and then what? They've been known to chew their legs off or pull their faces off trying to escape, they're ridiculously inhumane and pure animal cruelty right there. I don't see the point of torturing the poor animal, just kill it and get it over with. And the fact that some people throw them in the garbage while they're still alive just makes it even more horrendous. I wouldn't mind seeing them outlawed, making an animal slowly die in agony when there are better ways just seems wrong to me.

 

We live in the country and our cat is a great hunter. So for us it's mostly clean-up. Joy.

After grad school, I was living in DC in a 3rd floor walk-up studio with my cat. Always an indoor cat, didn't think she was a hunter. But one night she caught a mouse! I had no clue how to handle - didn't really want to let her "play" until the mouse died, all over my apartment. I called my mom. She wondered how the hell she could help me from 1000 miles away ;-)

 

My cat is too lazy to kill any mice. She'd rather play with the billiard balls on the pool table.

 

Our cat does like to sleep on the pool table ;-)

Cat hasn't brought any "toys" into the house lately, but it's been a hot summer - I think too hot for her to hunt much. If the weather ever starts to cool off here, she might start again. We do see her scoping out the compost pile in the backyard regularly ;-)

[she's so good - she's killed squirrel, lots of bunnies, and a hummingbird even! Not quite sure how she did that, but.....Normally it's just field mice]

 

Our cats don't go outside except to be on the screened-in porch. My mom comes over and feeds our cats when we go on vacation. One day one of the cats brought a live lizard in the house while Mom was keeping watch. Picture an 82yo catching a lizard, she got it.

 

I had dinner at my sister's place last month. We were talking on the couch when I noticed something moving in the corner. It was a big rat! The rat climbed a curtain cord and started walking along the curtain rod. My brother and his wife saw me looking up and they turned and the wife screamed when she saw the big rat running across the curtain rod. My sister said that the rats like the dog food so they put the dog food in a trash can and close it to prevent the rats from going after it.

 

You know, I agree with you... we occasionally will have a problem out in the garage and I bought some of the glue-traps. We caught one and my daughter and wife were totally freaked out because, though it was stuck... it wasn't dead. I got rid of the rest and am getting the electric ones.

 

Yeah, they cause a lot of unnecessary pain and distress. They can catch other animals too, like birds, lizards and pets. And they're a terrific source for communicable diseases like Hantavirus because a panicked animal will poop and pee in them more often. I don't see how they're any better than the multitude of options without the above problems.