We've Got Mice-Help!!! (merged threads)

loobyloo2

Butterfly_Brain wrote: »

If you put a bowl of fizzy drink down and the rodents drink that - the gases build up in their bodies and they die

ABSOLUTE RUBBISH

Where do you get these ideas from?

Rats and mice are notoriously difficult to get rid of unless you use the correct method for the circumstances.
If you know where they are getting in, block it up. Expanding foam, brick, wirewool.

Poison them if you can, but if you dont clean thoroughly, or leave food lying around, why would they prefer to eat poison? That chip that got swept under the cupboard, or the sweet under the fridge, and all the tasty morsels under the cooker! Get down and look under the kickboards, you will see if they have been there, sweep up,put poison down, then it can take up to 2 weeks for the poison to kill mice, rats are a bit quicker.
Sticky traps are great, but who really wants to deal with a live mouse or rat wriggling away on it and taking forever to die.
They are cruel. But...do the job.
If you are getting nowhere fast, do use a pest control company, just make sure you ring around and get an idea of how much they charge and how many visits you will need.
They breed like crazy, and a small problem can be huge in next to no time.

The only mouse I had in my kitchen was a field mouse that climbed up the outside wall and in through the open window one Sunday afternoon, then gaily scampered in front of me on the worktop while I was preparing dinner. Popped a container over the top of it, and relocated it outside where it belongs, cute.
However, OH deals with these pesky things every day with his business, so I have an abundance of traps, boards and poison for the little blighters if they ever want to visit:p

Slinky

Butterfly_Brain wrote: »

If you put a bowl of fizzy drink down and the rodents drink that - the gases build up in their bodies and they die

Dont rats fart then?

charlies-aunt

Mouse look a bit like gravy granules similar size and shape but dark gravy.

Rats have brown droppings shaped like a grain of rice but approx 1/2 cm long.

Please take care as you can catch Weils Disease from rats - and the rat dribbles urine as it runs and moves about so you need to thoroughly clean everywhere you think they have been and anything they might have touched.

I like both mice and rats as animals but they are b*ggers for gnawing power cables and other stuff when they take up residence with you! The last mouse we had was living in our airing cupboard - I was not pleased to find the little s*d had gnawed tunnels through my pile of 'best' towels....grrhhh! :mad:

tandraig

can i just say - that a dead rat that is somewhere inaccessable - stinks for ages - weeks in fact! i worked in a store and one morning there was a dreadful smell in my department. it got worse as the days wore on and in the end - the boss got in the council experts. they took down a false wall (it was a very old building that got tarted up with plasterboard walls) and found a decomposing rat. one of the men told me it could take weeks for the body to skeletonise and the stink seemed to seep into the fabric of the building - not to mention the stock (ladies dresses). the store had to shut down - what was this rat eating? well - it was eating the biscuits and chocs in the gift department - there was no sell by dates or stock control and the boxes etc at the back of the shelves were all chewed up!!! the council men put down traps of poison and before long the whole shop stank and virtually had to be gutted as the rats all crawled behind the walls to die!!! duhhh - what did they think would happen? big sign on shop - closed for refurbishment! lol - no more false walls and when we reopened all the customers thought it looked better before! little did they know us staff worked better and slept better knowing we werent a couple of feet from rat family!

Ladyhawk

I worked in a pub a long time ago in the middle of no where... we had problems with rats. I remember one scuttling through the pub when we were busy... EEP! Anyway they landlord decided to take things into his own hands and put down rat poison which was great... except it was summer and they all died in the roof. There were certain parts of the pub that absolutely stank. The worst part of it was I was serving a punter at the bar one day and maggots fell onto the bar... I had to descreetly wipe them away before anyone saw.... YUCK!!!

Pippajo

Thanks everybody, FIL has lent me a rat trap, plus we now have poison down both in our house and next door, we are a 1980's semi with cavity walls and both us and the neighbours have heard it in the loft above the main bedroom, and also had things eaten in the kitchen.

Next door has bricked up where he thinks they have got in through his house - and then very kindly visited ours :mad:.

Hopefully it will get sorted. Have put things in metal sweet tins and got to rearrange everything as only one high up cupboard and I'm short!

One of the joys of country living!

Pippajo

MrsE_2

Slinky wrote: »

Dont rats fart then?

My cats do:D

Charlie even makes a farting sound:rotfl:

I can't work out how he does this, as he doesn't have bum cheeks:rotfl:

babs2008

Having had both at some stage, rat droppings tend to be about at least 1/2 cm to 1 cm and mice droppings less that 1/2 cm.

Wire wool is the way to go if you can find out where they come in and until you can fill it properly.

Both mice and rats can leave trails of urine, so be a little more cautious with surfaces etc.

I found traps caught the mice, but that wasn't enough - they must have bred fast.

I wont tell you of the story of the mice that woke me up in the middle of the night... ok I will... the blighter had managed to crawl under my bedroom door, get on my bed and I woke up with the thing sniffing my head. It soon must have regretted it as a swift arm movement and lifting up of the duvet sent it flying across the room. (I moved out not long after!)

humphriess

Hi All,
We discovered we have mice about two weeks ago. Not seen anything but there was small tears in our food recycling bag (the council provided food recycling bin is plastic with loads of holes in it). Wasn't sure if it had just got ripped at first but happened a few days running. Then we found droppings in the cleaning cupboard under the sink. We have put traps down but they haven't worked. Tried peanut butter, chocolate (green and Blacks) and courgette (thats what they ate out of the bin). Thought we'd try a sweeter chocolate so now have mars bars in two traps and tuna (my OH read this somewhere) in the other two. why can't we catch them though? We've moved or changed the food every two/three days is this affecting the traps? There is never any droppings on the floor and loads of possible places they could get in (very old house). Last night i put flour on the floor around the room to try and work out the best places to put the traps. But when i woke up this morning, there seems to be hundreds of footprints in all directions in the four. i am now paranoid that we have loads of mice living in our kitchen that are two clever for traps. Any advice anyone please? Keep dreaming they are crawling across my face. And don't like eating food at home or cooking at the moment.
Can't get a cat as OH is very allergic to them. Please help.

kayjay1809

I find the best thing for a trap is chocolate spread, it's sticky so the mouse has to hang around long enough to get killed.. I've had them steal bits of chocolate off a trap before! We have an ongoing problem with mice, we had one the other week eating from a bit of chocolate which had fallen down behind the microwave and it shot out when OH was making his breakfast, gave him a right shock. Having had a real infestation a few years ago I have no sentimentality for them, so a trap went down and caught that one. We have an area in our kitchen where we get the mice in, we've blocked up everything on the outside with concrete (!) so I can only assume they are coming in from under the house. We have poison down there permanently which gets checked every couple of days. After the microwave incident we had the poison being eaten for a while then nothing since. When infested I caught 40 mice in one day, so it is possible to get rid of them, it just takes a while. I hate them now, have a real fear of them.. so poison and traps are always at the ready!! We live backing onto fields and all houses around us seem to get mice, most have cats but my husband isn't keen on cats so we don't.