Mouse Eradication Day

[snoozequeen1]

Our biology teacher used to tell us of his admiration for the Chinese who he claimed had eradicated the house fly by mobilising the entire nation to swat, en masse.

I am just wondering if it would be possible to organise a London mouse eradication day. Round here they are getting bigger, they are getting smarter (they don't take poison from the little trays) and there are more of them. Have read all the good advice on here, like stuff all the air vents with wire wool etc. But all you need to do now is leave a door or window open and they're back. One has just nipped through the French doors and ran over my foot.

I'm thinking bussing in of cats, tiny little machine guns, etc? Surely someone can organise this, via the BBC or something?

[Huguenot]

I'm afraid that your Biology teacher was having you on about the Chinese.

There is a fabulous piper available for hire, but beware his credit terms are somewhat onerous.

[Peckhamgatecrasher]

Oh bliss - child free ED!

[KalamityKel]

Bloomin' 'eck I'm as blind as anything this morning. Read Chinese as Cheese :-s

[zephyr]

What poison do you use?

I have always found rat poison (grain covered in poison) to be the most effective one. At least they are still taking it anyways.

[Muley]

Get a good old-fashioned mouse trap and bait it with chocolate- mice love chocolate, and chocolate raisins are particularly effective.

PGC, sounds like you've got one foot on the slippery slope to Lenk-dom!

[ratty]

Sticky boards. Cruel but brutally effective!

[bigbadwolf]

Sticky boards are useless. I've got a few mice living with me at the moment and I've had enough of listening to them scratch away at night. I bought some rat traps (much more powerful than conventional mouse traps) with chocolate as bait but they're so strong that when one of the little critters trigers the trap it usually explodes leaving me to clean up the offal. I don't want to loose a toe to one of the traps either when I'm stumbling about at night.

Has anyone named their furry intruders yet? Mine are called 'Daff' n 'Dill' after daffodil.

Hopefully they'll be dead soon.

[SteveT]

snoozequeen1 wrote:- (they don't take poison from the little trays)

Sprinkle it on to the floor they will be more likely to take it, or get some cooking chocolate melt it and add the poisonous grains, allow it to cool and break into pieces and bait traps. If the traps fail the bait should do it.

[bigbadwolf]

Bloody 'ell Steve, you'll be bottle feeding them next!

[Muley]

Ours demand 70% cocoa solids, organic, fair-trade, or they get all huffy

[Muley]

AND then they expect you to sort the foil from the paper wrapper and put them in the appropriate recycling bins

[Brendan]

You?re all missing the route of the problem folks, cat food.

Stop feeding your cats and the mice will slowly disappear.

I blame advertising with their, ?I am an Iams cat but I can?t read? (yeah but you can bloody talk, eh) and the little cartoony one called Felix. I suspect cat influence in the upper echelons of the advertising industry ensuring the freeloading felines of suburbia continue their life of riley.

[bigbadwolf]

That's masterfull Brendan!

See that everyone. Take note, get your cats to work for their dinner. Once the mice are gone you can reward them with a well earned drink of water. To encourage them to produce results during the extermination, put motor oil in your cats water bowl. They wont drink it but they'll be thankful when it's replaced with water. Who knows, perhaps Brendan may have inspired some sort of socio-feline experiment here.

[zephyr]

Peanut butter is also very good in traps!

[Brendan]

It's nice on sandwiches too.

[snoozequeen1]

Ugh. I wish I could do that, with the sticky boards. But what do you do with stuck mouse? This is why I would need the tiny machine gun.

Doesn't seem to be need at the mo. to put poison in chocolate (and in any case I would forget and eat it myself).

The tip on scattering the poison granules, so it looks like dropped crumbs, is a top tip. Problem is they have been eating it for days now and seem to be thriving on it. Am sure they are getting bigger. Unless I have small rats.

Next door's cat is excellent mouser but she can't keep up, poor thing. She's done for two lots but this is fourth or fifth infestation. Also once you've put poison down, you don't know if cat is then going to consume poisoned mouse and croak too.

I get a week off, then they're back.

Feel we need London-wide effort, would be v good for renewing community spirit, as per The Blitz, and we could then have anti-mouse stations with home-guard cats stationed around the M25.

[bob]

Agree with Zephyr use rat poison don't put it in clean littel container's old jam peanut butter and any other lid's still dirty pile it up so it falls over the floor around the lid's it's still gona take time.

Bob S

[david_carnell]

Huguenot Wrote:

-------------------------------------------------------

> I'm afraid that your Biology teacher was having

> you on about the Chinese.

>

> There is a fabulous piper available for hire, but

> beware his credit terms are somewhat onerous.

I was under the impression, perhaps misguided, that the Chinese (during the cultural revolution) were instructed to bang metal pots, pans, etc to scare off sparrows to prevent them from eating the crops.

From dawn till dusk, peasants did what they were told and sparrows began to drop from the sky due to sheer exhaustion. The plan had worked. However, the sparrows (or their Chinese equivilent) also ate all the bugs and worms that lived in the fields. With no predators these wee beaties flourished and devoured crops at a rapacious rate. The harvest failed miserably and hundreds of thousands starved.

The story may be apocryphal (although I think it is repeated in Wild Swans) but nonetheless is indicative of the madness inherent in Maoist political doctrine.

[bigbadwolf]

Is that your way of saying Catch 22 Dave?

[Huggers]

our mice seem to have gone.

We put down poison(one lot) and sticky traps (caught two)but also plugged in siren things in every mouse-attractive room. We havent seen any since june and this is in a house where they had got to the stage where they were sauntering around without a care in the world in front of our very eyes- so whichever of the devices has worked has worked.

[dbboy]

Makes me think you need to borrow that tabby cat mentioned else where on EDF, it'd give them a seeing too.

http://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/forum/read.php?5,314131,page=1

[Huguenot]

Hmm, possibly d_c, but it also packs in an awful lot of cliches about the Chinese into one short tale....

It characterises them as innumerable uneducated, shortsighted, primeval, dogmatic automatons.

I know that would correspond with the prevailing ambitions of the local leadership of the time: the sacrifice and application of people power in a low technology world was really the only thing they had to run on.

So if it is an apocryphal tale, it could have been written by either side!

I shall investigate further!

[Huguenot]

I stand corrected.

There was indeed an official campaign called 'The Four Pests'.

The sparrows appear to have been the only one targeted in the end, but not so much through pan banging as nesting and egg stealing.

It only last two years from '58 to '60, when a consequent plague of locusts highlighted the folly of this unilateral extermination strategy.

One of the four pests was also the mosquitos, but again, the execution of the campaign wasn't through hand clapping, but the employment of strategies still used in Singapore - the eradication of stagnant water.

Did you know in Singapore you're only allowed to keep flowers in water for a maximum for two days?

Before anyone looks too steeply down their nose at the Chinese, I'd refer our earnest readers to the dustbowl of the USA in the 30s, the current over salination and desertification of southern Australia and the catastrophic breakdown in the UK's biodiversity cause by hedgerow removal between 1920 and the Hedgerows act of '97.

We could look at the introduction of rabbits to Australia, or even quite simply the destruction of the Great Barrier Reef.

All of these acts of mass self-destruction were caused, and continue to be caused by millions of people who get some really stupid ideas and refuse to let them go!

[Brendan]

Didn't John Howard recently suggest something about hitting cane toads with golf clubs?