Mice

[the commentator]

Can anyone recommend a way -other than getting a cat - to get rid of mice in the house, please. Is this an issue in ED?

[Peckhamgatecrasher]

chocolate, scimitar, patience and a quick reaction.

[taper]

Traps. Lots of them, with regularly changed bait and positioning. The longer a mouse survives, the cleverer the swine becomes. You have to get them early and be ruthless. Wherever there is pooh, stick a trap. Poison can be used too, but it won't work on its own. Head squashing traps are your infantry: they will retake and secure your territory from the vermin menace.

And once they've gone, keep the traps in position as a defensive line for future attacks.

Revel in your kills like a latter day Hemingway. Keep a tab, mark them up on your fridge door.

[flapjackdavey]

I like Mice

Mice are my brothers

Mice never bother me . sitting at my tea

I give them half of what I'm eating

Rats are a different kettle of fish

'faces aint so friendly

when they eat you in the night you do not want tot know .

and they smell very very strange .

[SteveT]

First things first, find where they are getting in to the building.

How?

take a fine sieve,

fill with flour plain or self raising is good,

walk around the edge of your abode tapping gently and sprinkle,

look for where the action is and block with cement or stainless steel wool.

Place spring traps at right angles to the skirting so they stick out into the room but the bait is nearest to the wall.

A good bait is chocolate,

a better bait is to melt the chocolate and add that blue poisoned seed to it,

and when cooled break into small squares and load the traps.

Save the remainder for future use you can sprinkle that directly on their runs.

Sticky traps are good for a change,

because the cunning vermin will not be trapped if one of their relatives have died in similar trap as they heard or saw it.

There are also traps which are humane and leave the mice to live and persecute some one else,

but they are different option, though once you have caught one or two you will catch no more.

Collect them all up and use a different method.

When using the poisonous seeds do not use the plastic trays provided,

sprinkle on the floor as they are more likely to discover it and consume it.

You might sprinkle some flour indoors to find where they move around.

Best of luck.

[woofmarkthedog]

KatsTM

Way better than ordinary moggies

I train them in mercenary style warfair & then hire them out

Can you afford them though, it ain't cheap but....

Scratch ,scratch ,nibble.....

Yikes, mouse in the house

W**F

[Brendan]

Mice are evolving, getting smarter, faster and more able to detect poisons, because of their cohabitation with humans. Urban mice are apparently significantly more intelligent than ones found in the wild.

It?s all down to natural selection. The smart ones don?t end up in a trap the fast ones don?t end up inside a cat and the ones with a good sense of smell don?t eat poison.

They also produce around 730 generations a century compared to our 4 or 5 so they can evolve around 180 times faster than us.

Not only are they getting more and more difficult to catch but our efforts to exterminate them are creating a type of super mouse that may one day overtake us and end up being the dominant species in this little arrangement we have.

We had one in our house about a year ago. Smart little bugger. I found the tracks with talc and put baited traps in the way. Nothing. When I checked for tracks again they just went around the traps and I?m sure they spelt out ?fuck you? in one area.

Poison was similarly ignored.

Eventually I was forced to set my wife on it. She cornered it in the living room and I trapped it in a lunchbox.

So there we were, face to face with nothing but a few millimetres of transparent Tupperware separating us. The hominid and the rodent. Two players in a Darwinian game being spun out over millennia. As once the hominid had looked out of the cave at the sabre toothed cat, whose pitiable decedents are now confined to our zoos, so now did the rodent look at out me, and I in at it.

?Aww, cute ickle mousy, couldn?t possibly kill it.? Thought I. (looking cute is probably another of their wily evolutionary adaptations.)

?Mug.? Thought the mouse

And, ?I hope he lets me out near a rich person?s house. I?m sick of eating his crap cereal.?

[Moos]

They're not that smart. Our dim domestic mogs (brains 75% the size of their wild cousins) who can barely string a miaouw together keep our house remarkably rodent-free. The only rare sightings we get are of decapitated mice and the occasional wild scramble around the kitchen in front of a chuckling cat. The scrambles don't last long.

(Did I even spell miaow correctly? How many vowels can you fit into a one-syllable word?)

[bloonoo]

peanut butter on a mouse trap. works every time! cheese is old news.

[Brendan]

Miaoue?

Peanut butter, chocolate, special mouse bait from the shops. All to no avail.

My company obviously just attracts a more cerebral sort of mouse.

[katie1997]

looking cute? they are the most terrifying beasts to roam the earth.....terrifying I tell you.

sorry commentator, I hope you get rid of the mice very soon. I think Katz are the best deterrents though.

[PennyDreadful]

Mice do seem to be a big issue round here. We got rid of ours (with precious little help from our cat) by using electric plug-in 'sonic deterrent' things which emit a sound humans can't hear but rodents can't stand. For the first few days, we thought these devices were just making things worse, as mice seemed to be charging about all over the place - but we read an online review that said that at first the mice run around as the sound drives them mad but then they simply depart. So we persevered and that's exactly what happened - they just went away and haven't come back! Can't remember the exact brand name of the plug-ins we used, but they were like these ones. I think we bought them at Dulwich DIY on Lordship Lane.

[Moos]

Brendan Wrote:

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> My company obviously just attracts a more cerebral

> sort of mouse.

You'll wake up one morning to find them leafing through your Proust, and nodding sagely.

Clearly there's a secret sign outside your house in mouse that reads 'Smart guy lives here, can spell. No thickies to apply. Crap cereal, though.'

[Brendan]

Great, super quick, highly intelligent, heightened sense of smell and now they?re going to develop specialised hearing too.

[Brendan]

Moos Wrote:

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> You'll wake up one morning to find them leafing

> through your Proust, and nodding sagely.

If they want to take the water bill off my hands that's fine by me.

[Moos]

specialised hearing like this?

Or more probably like this

[Brendan]

Yes, they probably will develop music too given time.

[Peckhamgatecrasher]

So out of date Brendan:

[Brendan]

It's worse than I thought.

[david_carnell]

Moos Wrote:

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> You'll wake up one morning to find them leafing

> through your Proust, and nodding sagely.

Surely a mouse would read the Little Red Book by Mouse Tse-tung? Or perhaps a little Rodentkranz?

But they hate Schrodinger's cat.

[Brendan]

And all the while they?re getting smarter as we slip ever further into gibberish.

[woofmarkthedog]

I hate...

bloomin' Mice...

http://static.fancydress.com/resources/ecommerce/images/products/907/426/img426907/product-enlarged.jpg

We were invaded by the pesky things this winter & it's taken ages to get rid of them

So far 3 big boxes of poison (= 1.5kg ) plus numerous "customised" traps & endless corpses

And still we battle on...

Though we now have two KittenAssassinsTM who seem rather keen on murder

So we shall see...

W**F

[Brendan]

Now you know how the Neanderthals must have felt when Cro-Magnon Man moved into Europe. And we all know what happened with that little situation don?t we. Well? Don?t we. Eh?

[*Bob*]

Cro-Magnon Man in Europe?

[woofmarkthedog]

Which one....

....is you *Bob*..?

W**F