I don’t like doing battle with mice. It’s not any “ick factor,” which I generally find low with them. It’s that I can empathize with mice. They’re just looking out for themselves the best they know how just like I am. A mouse has a face. A mouse nurses her babies. You get it. Or maybe you don’t, but that’s where I’m coming from.
I wish they’d just stay out of our living space. Thankfully we’ve never had to deal with them in the house proper, but even in the shed or the garage, they defecate indiscriminately and destroy property.
So they can’t stay.
Though my empathy is genuine, it is not boundless. I don’t want to screw with live traps and having to release them somewhere else. However, I find glue traps unnecessarily cruel. An immobilized mouse whose flight instinct is continually firing must surely be a miserable creature. (And, it will eventually do desperate things.)
So, tried and true it is. A snap trap is inexpensive, instantly lethal, and I’m practiced at releasing its victim without touching it.
I’ve killed two this weekend in the garage, having been alerted to a murine presence by a few bites missing from the bar of soap on the utility sink. Got one that night, but I knew there was at least one more because though the trap was sprung, all of the bait was gone.
Peanut butter remained on the trap after I got the second one, so I was hopeful I had a couple of scouts and not a big infestation. And indeed, last night I reset the trap, and this morning all of the peanut butter was still there. So maybe that’s it. I’m not sure how they got in. If they walked in the open garage door, then of course I can’t prevent that. But if they squeezed under the garage door where the seal was degraded, I installed a new one last week. So we’ll see. I’ll leave the trap set for a few more days.
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