A mouse in the house

We had rats in our house last year, yes I know it was disgusting. The fuckers used to make so much noise scurrying round in the attic and stuff. anyway we tried traps and caught about three in a row, then a friend recommended this little plug in sonar thing you buy at hardware shops that makes a high pitched noise driving rats, and I presume mice, away.

It worked perfectly, no problems since. It was quite cheap too.

We discovered they couldn't abide New Order's "Substance" or Brian Eno's "Before and After Science."

I got very familiar with those two albums that summer.

Maybe it was lonely.

bye.

I lived on a farm for a few years growing up and we had a major rat problem. For the first few nights, I sat up in bed wide-eyed as I watched them run across the far wall.

I am rambling - sorry - but yes, really, do get a rat or two!

I've been keeping food wrapped, but still sometimes it'll eat into the bread bag.

As for ants which we tend to get in the summer, I'm a believer in white vinegar... spray it where you think they come in... they won't. Has to be redone every few days to a week, but I like having vinegar around a lot more than poison.

We had a pet rat once - a lab rat we name Malty. He was pretty. Beige & cream colored.

Anyway, I think that rats, by their very nature, will try to keep themselves scentless so as to be harder to scent by predators.

Funniest rat story - my mother was having a dinner party. My rat thought the food smelled good and opened her cage door, crept down the hallway, and then up onto the tabletop (likely scaling the tableleg and then the table cloth). Once on the table she saw someone holding a piece of garlic bread - and went running toward the bread - she grabbed it and continued running down the length of the table until she reached then end, where she launched herself into space and ran back down the hallway and into my bedroom. Needless to day, the dinner party ended rather soon after that, with lots of fairly full plates and plenty of leftovers.

Names of my rats:
Ratfina
Josephine/Little Jo
Portia (the coolest!)
Cocoa
Sage
Pepper (current psycho rat - never gentled down - I wanted to name her "blitzkreig" as she leaps and bites unexpectedly, and has a lightening strike mark on her belly)

So you were naked in a bathtub with a rat swimming around? I'm not sure how this makes me feel.

am curious to hear more about this high-pitched rat phear machine. tell me more!!

If you're worried about mice, set up a trap, and if you catch one, set it up again. If you haven't caught one after a week or so, you're probably okay.

We're too wussy to actually know how to deal with this type of situation, so we've just called out pest control to kill the bastard(s). It's a shame, though, as it's actually kind of cute in a fuzzy unhygienic vermin type way.

This is made even worse by the fact that it's just one in a long line of things that are going wrong for me at the moment, compounding the lack of money/breaking up with long-term boyfriend/about to become homeless situation (yes, I guess if we're about to leave then really we should just let the mouse live, but I'm not staying for another month in a place that is infested).

Bah.

fuck just a month ago i'm getting frustrated cos possums are fucking in our ceiling (ever heard possums fuck? its all screeching and running around and hissing - bad b&d) and i got up to move to another room and i'm about to go into the kitchen and in the half light of 2am i spy this fucking rat on the kitchen floor!!! so i creep back out and get a spade and creep back up behind the fucka and WHACK WHACK WHACK. blood and guts everywhere.

i figure he was stoned on the rat bait cos he never moved too fast.

It must say something terrible about me that when I read this exchange I initially assumed you were discussing a Big Brother contestant's opinion on such matters.

I couldn't bring myself to kill them, particularly not in such a blood'n'guts way - I think I have as much of a problem with dealing with the lifeless body of one as I do with a scurrying scampering one. So, ha, I make someone else do my dirty work for me.

they used to run around in the attic and the first night it happened it sounded like someone was walking around upstairs, very fucking scary.

fuck ronan they sound like BIG rats!

it's funny actually we had to change the setting on it because me and my brother (but not my parents) could hear its barely audible high pitched whirring all around the house.

When I first moved to Denver I was startled by a mouse ambling slowly out into the middle of my empty living room, but more because of the sudden realization that I wasn't alone. It tried to hide in a pile of curtains but I caught it in a shoebox and put it outside. I never saw another one in that apartment. I figured it was lost because in other houses I've lived in that were genuinely infested, the mice would stick to the walls or hidden spots and scurry very quickly, not just stroll out into the middle of rooms.

The mouse left of it's own accord, probably to squeak to all his mousemates about the idiot human who watched too many cartoons.

wow. for a horrible minute i thought my mate jon's electric mousetrap (as discussed, oddly enough, at the glasgow FAP on tuesday) had passed into popular existence.

this is how it worked (or didn't):

- you chop the electrical flex off something, eg a kettle
- you tape the neutral wire to a piece of tinfoil
- you tape the live wire to another piece of tinfoil
- you place the two bits of tinfoil on the floor, near enough that a mouse walking across them would complete the circuit
- you plug this death-trap contraption into the mains
- there's a bang and all your lights go out

mind you: he was driven to desperate measures after finding a mouse in his toaster one morning. after he'd turned the toaster on.

Im wondering about the ethics of mouse traps but just want the buggers OUT. Il try the sonar thing however other (possibly more scientific) posts on the internet indicate they dont actually work at all. But its worth the try...

thinking it's time to rewatch Mouse Hunt

Trivia for the day: Apollo was associated with a lot of things, like the sun and the fine arts, but he was also known as the god of mice.

coat engine wire in calcium

I have to confess to having electrocuted a mouse in a trap this week. Up until last year, I'd always aimed to "live trap".

I didn't massively mind when they were just sticking to limited parts of the kitchen but was just too weird and stressful when I knew they'd been in some drawers of clothing (and I would see one every time I woke in the night).

ah, the wicked little darlings

we had to trash a dresser when we found they'd rummaged every drawer like it was a 3-storey apartment building

i'd have much preferred kitting it out with dollhouse furniture and spycams, but alas

It might amuse that I have just realised that the mouse is managing to hoard *cat biscuits* behind a book case. The cat has truly given up hunting.

that's awesome

I found where they were getting in the kitchen and covered all the holes with a cut-up soup can... Haven't had a mouse in a long time but the pantry still vaguely smells like mouse piss

The cat is old and is in for 23 hours a day. A mouse is managing to go to his cat bowl and steal, while he oblivious.

actual squeaking coming from kitchen yesterday, which I've not heard before. did the usual thing of walking around in there noisily, opening cupboards and wobbling the fridge and it went away.

A colleague had a rat coming into his house. It wasn't just eating food left out in the kitchen but things like the sponge he had for washing up. He used to close the kitchen door and then knock before going in.

We’ve had a mouse in the flat for a week. In case you were wondering, whippets are shite at mousing: Widget just looked at me as if to say “the fuck was that?” as one ran out from behind my sofa.

“The horror…”

> i've had one that's run across the gap between the stereo and the cd shelves at about 6pm every day for about a week, but not for the last couple of days.
> ― koogs, Thursday, 5 December 2024

back, and at 2 in the afternoon. has he been hibernating?

Our now-fatarse boy caught a mouse again recently so we opened the back door so he could take it outside to make a mess with but the fucker just dropped the mouse and ran outside, he was more interested in Going Outdoors than the damn mouse (which he'd killed anyway). He'd been stalking the fridge for like a week.

(the mouse was prob behind the fridge. Not in it.)

this evening he just seems to be wandering around, first over there, then over there. always seems surprised to see me and scampers off even though i haven't moved. he was sniffing the (unset) humane trap earlier. let's see if he's stupid enough to wander into it.

flat is so cluttery that the odds are in his favour tbh, there's like 75% of it that i can't reach. and what would i do if i did corner him, catch him with my hands?

Killed a mouse in the "electrocuting trap" this week and I must confess to an odd feeling of relief. I'd prefer to catch them in humane traps but they often don't seem, um, tempting to them.

There’s a mouse in my flat, plus one useless whippet who hasn’t noticed it. Widget has seen mice outside recently, and went nuts trying to get at them. *sigh*

Ugh I think we might have a whole nest in the crawlspace/gap in our living room where the water heater and furnace live - theres a space large enough to stick ones head into and look about but you couldnt climb right in there easily. But I can see mousecrap everywhere. This house is such a shithole.

Can you stuff it full of steel wool or something?

I'm sure this has been covered upthread but I learned this week that you are not supposed to use a vacuum to get rid of mouse poop

Why

Yeah why bcs that is what I was planning on doing :/

so apparently it stirs up dust and is one of the main reasons people contract the hantavirus (and various other illnesses). There is also an exhaust on a vacuum which shoots the nasty stuff into the air, especially in rooms that are not ventilated. I know there are a lot of alarmists online, so after I read some very scary things I spoke to a few smarter-than-me real life friends about this and they confirmed that the consensus is to never sweep or vacuum mouse poop, but to spray disinfectant on it and then (yikes) wipe it up with a cloth, wearing a mask at all times. Mouse poop is serious business, I guess. Things you were shockingly old when you learned! I've used a small hand vacuum thing on mice droppings in the past, guess I dodged a bullet. Also FYI it's not only the poop that you can see that is dangerous but also the invisible urine and saliva that accompanies it

It is but hantavirus isn't everywhere. I believe it's only a N/S America thing and in the US the overwhelming majority of cases are west of the Mississippi. There's a good map here - https://www.cdc.gov/hantavirus/data-research/cases/index.html. Still wouldn't fuck with mouse poop but wouldn't worry too much unless you're in the Western US. The dude I dated during uni moved to Gallup NM the year there was a huge outbreak (which weirdly was a result of the santa ana winds because the winds meant more pinon nuts which meant more mice) of hantavirus. I did a lot of reading on the topic that summer lol.

> I've used a small hand vacuum thing on mice droppings in the past

I've used a small hand vacuum thing on mice droppings in the past week!

there was a guy on uk programme Car SOS who contracted something from rat dropping that fucked his liver. in fact, here you go

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/hantaviruses

talks about 'Old World hantavirus'

Yeah, there are similar viruses in Europe but they're not respiratory and I think usually milder but maybe not. Good practice not to vacuum or sweep mouse droppings in general. Was just saying I wouldn't get too freaked out about it because it's still pretty rare overall.

I hadn’t moved the washing machine from its spot for awhile, so when the pestie showed up last week, we had to move it, check for droppings, and remove the droppings. Pro tip: use dilute biological laundry detergent in a spray bottle - it breaks down animal wee of any kind, and said animals tend not to return to places that have been cleaned with bio liquid.

had a mouse in the bin bag earlier. was sat on the sofa and could hear it rustling. there's nothing approaching food in there, just plastic packaging so i laid it on its side and kicked it a bit and he ran out and under the skirting board.

i also notice the humane trap is closed. but did i close it when I'd not seen anything for a couple of weeks or is it full of starved mouse?

in the last 30 minutes the mouse has eaten the two pumpkin seeds at the mouth of the trap whilst resisting the temptation of the seeds and nuts within the tap. i didn't hear a thing, despite being 10ft away.

it was as quiet as a _____.

This fucker's been eating my organic tomato for the last three nights. Yesterday I placed a sticky trap under the tomato, thinking I'd done him in, but this morning I discovered more of the tomato had been eaten, and he even left some discarded tomato fiber on the trap, as if to taunt me. He must be a clever fellow, or else all the vitamins from the tomato have provided him with the strength to resist the adhesive.

my remedy has been owning cats.

since you've committed to death, electric traps are very effective

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61gJP6mSBQL._AC_UF894,1000_QL80_.jpg

Update: my whippet now catches mice.

FFS

I like the look of those electric traps, bet they don't work as well as in the picture though

Probably just leaves a mouse lolloping around your kitchen with its face seared off

i don't know what y'all are complaining about. one of my cats brought in a live rabbit at 4 AM the other night.

they work very well and my apartment is mouse free thanks to them xp

We used electric traps in the Museum of Fine Arts Houston warehouses and they worked well. Better than the sticky traps that they replaced which was just sad. In my garage I used the old fashioned spring trap which does the trick.

Or get a live trap and dump the mice in the backyard of an enemy.

FFS we have a mouse again. I left a very expensive, super treatsy chocolate bar out on a table and it had nibbles out of it the next day.

I have a music room in the garage that has turned into a gear storage room that gets neglected. A rat found its way in and by the time I noticed it thing had gotten gross. Figuring out how to fill the room with bleach to kill all of the disease and foulness.

xp sounds like you attracted a high class mouse!

xp family friends had to throw out boxes their children's baby memorabilia because the rats had caused so much damage in their basement storage area.

Yeah the painful things are when memories get destroyed.

For me, I live in a 1920s house with no setback to the neighbors, so there's no way for me to plug all the holes.

I do see that 'no kill' traps plus peanut butter seems to keep the numbers under control. (i release them at the nearby park, where hopefully the local red tailed hawks deal with them)

For me, I have a dog so I must not put out anything the dog will get into.

I found a "Big Cheese" electric trap to be effective (I drew the line at a mouse getting in a clothes drawer).

Came home after a night out and a big curry. Switched on the bedroom light and something ran very fast out the room. Lay awake all night wondering if it was a mouse (which I know we have) or a rat (god forbid).

Trouble is, I live in a 100 flat block. I told the management company three months ago and they've done nothing at all.

First they said they were checking records to see when the last time contractors were brought in to lay traps and poison. Then they said they were getting quotes (which set alarm bells ringing as it suggested no one had been to do it in a long time). Then some manager was on holiday so they couldn't get sign-off. Then they blamed other residents' late payment.

It's a joke. I am going to get a pest controller in, but there's no point if the mice are coming in from elsewhere in the building

Call your local council’s pest control unit? That’ll spur the management company into action!

I don't think they deal with private properties