What are extremely effective ways to get rid of mice?
I have been struggling with mice despite doing things such as removing all possible food sources and keeping the house extremely clean. I have traps set up but am having little to no luck. What else could I be doing to get rid of these pests?
Answers ( 1 )
I will assume you include rats. I've been fighting mice and rats for a decade, and the following methods are arranged in decreasing order of effectiveness:
1. A rain barrel or other deep vessel with steep sides and water in the bottom. I rarely empty the rain barrel under my leaky barn roof without tossing out at least one drowned rat; the same goes for a tub under the water filter in our garage, except that gets mice.
2. Plain old "snap traps" baited with Eat-More toffee and/or grain. The rats chewed a hole in the lid of my birdseed barrel, so I put a modern plastic snap-trap right under the hole. It caught half a dozen rats before they figured it out. Old wooden snap-traps work too, but they're harder to set.
3. We got 2 cats which we let loose in places where the rodents thrive. They get some of them, but (a) not as many as the snap-traps; (b) I worry about their eating a poisoned mouse from when we set out rat poison; and (c) they seem to prefer catching voles outside.
4. Rat poison works well, but is discontinued now (see above).
5. Glue traps work for a while; then they figure them out (probably by observing their colleagues' efforts to escape) and stay away.
6. Fancy new expensive gizmos like CO2-powered mouse-killers and live traps almost never work.