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

Str4berr3

I've heard stories about people laying sticky traps around for mice/rats and when trapped some of them tend to chew their legs off as a desperate way to escape.
URGHHH!

Penny-Pincher!!

Another 2 down, so 6 in total now :eek:

xxx

HannahD_2

I'd be very pleased if we just had a few mice. We live on a smallholding here with a slight rat infestation at the moment! :eek: Not very nice.
We have two next to useless dogs that spend their times looking at the holes the rats come from, and two cats who spend 23 hours a day annoying my Mum by sleeping where they shouldn't, 1 hour nipping through the cat flap out for a wee and something to eat! Unfortunately the only way to control the rats is by poison which we get from the farmer next door.

However..... as for mice, we have those too!!!

We have to trap our mice to stop them from eating the horse feed and we use something called a better mouse trap made by Indruder Inc. It's grey and plastic and looks useless, but is fantastic at catching them. We also have an electro magnetic thing which plugs into the wall and that is called a Pest Clear 2000.

I hope that helps those with furry friends visiting!

ceegee

Had a rat once :eek: . Called council ratcatcher, (who turned up in quite a discreet van, thank goodness!)Apparently, little ratty had come in through a broken airbrick and was running around under the floorboards....he had been a baby rat when he first came in, as I saw him/her, about 5 inches long, inc tail. Somehow, sometimes, he would come out into the kitchen, late at night.But naturally the b....y thing grew. We got it in the end by laying poison and it died (peacefully, I gather). But we didn't know exactly where it was,so the downstairs floorboards had to come up. And as for the smell of decomposing rat....well, at least I learned where the expression "to smell a rat" came from!!! :eek: It was an absolute nightmare, especially as we had a baby and a toddler at the time.

So we blocked the broken airbrick with a stone and we've had no "visitors" since. Unless you have a moggy who brings these things in, it is important to check all around the bottom/outside of your house to see how they may be getting in. They can get in through a teeny weeny little gap.

I felt so embarrassed when I asked at my local hardware shop for the poison, but when he told me he was out of stock because because so many people had been in for some, I felt better!!

And it's not because your house is dirty, although you can't help but think that is why they are there....I know I did. Ohhhhh, the shame I felt.

lipidicman

We gave up on poison. It does kill them, but the smell and the effort of tearing up floorboards until you find them is misery. A mouse can decompose quickly - a rat will drive you out of the house. You even start thinking of flies as your friend. Then you need spiders to get rid of the flies - sound like a nursery rhyme?

Traps are better but, as I have mentioned, only if you get a clean kill.

We had them during a massive train depot construction. Also as we live in a terrace we did not view it as our fault. None of the neighbours would admit to having them though!

ceegee

lipidicman wrote:

,
but the smell

......is completely indescribable......there are not words in the English language that are adequate to describe it. If you took every foul smell that you can think of and mixed them all up, then perhaps add some heat, well you would not come anywhere near it.

It wasn't too bad initially....we thought we had a gas leak! Called out British Gas and the engineer checked everything and said that there was no leak and that was all he was allowed to say. But, he did tell us that he had been in a house recently with a reported gas leak and it had transpired that the house had a dead rat in it. (Not that he said it of course. IYKWIM!) That was when we realised that the little blighter had died and the search started. It had crawled along to another airbrick and died there, which meant that the smell was wafting around nicely inside the house. :rolleyes: It was quite warm at the time. It accounted for the sudden arrival of swarms of flies too . I really wonder why we didn't put two and two together, but we'd not had a rat before. Still, I'll know for next time.....and I do now consider myself to be something of an old hand when it comes to rat problems. :rolleyes:

lipidicman

Was it green and slimy by the time you found it?

squeaky

One of my recent dead mice cost me forty quid!

Sally often brings them home quite unharmed, puts them down while she goes off for a drink, or a nibble, or even a nap! and expects them to still be there when she gets back. Yeah right.

The day before the carpet fitters were due to arrive for the bedroom carpet the place developed an ever increasing and awful pong. I tracked it down to a place where the skirting board sat with a half inch gap above the floor boards. I could NOT hook the little er, thing, out and I know from experience that it, the pong, was going to get worse before it got better. There was no way I could ask the fitters to work in such a miasma.

I have no car - so it was an emergency taxi ride to the B&Q, two cans of spray foam to fill up ALL the gaps and cavities under and behind the skirting, and back home again.

£40

For a mouse.

And no, removing the skirting to fish out the mouse wasn't an option - the way this house is put together half the wall would have come with it!

catznine

I gather that was £40 well spent if the smell was going to be so bad! Yuk!

Well we came close to similar problem with a rat :eek: a couple of years ago, it was ecaping the new building site at the bottom of our garden and heading for our open back door! Thankfully 3 cats, 1 aging but still excitable springer spaniel, several heavy plant pots on a very heavy plank of wood balanced on some bricks brought about 1 very squashed and dead( thankfully) large rat! I almost felt sorry for it but the cats and dog couldn't believe their luck! :rotfl:

lipidicman

Wow, real 'mousetrap' construction there! Cant believe you managed to squash it!