To Kill or Not to Kill

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Hire a professional to do your dirty work. When they wink, pausing for emphasis, and say, "The, ahem, 'mouse' has taken the 'cheese,'" you won't know whether to feel relieved or panicked all over again.

Edit: Your experience with non-Sicilian professionals may be different.

Kill the mice and plug the holes before the snakes figure out that the food lives in your house. Unless you want to share with snakes too.

I would move and let the mice have the house. I am absolutely serious. I would continue making the mortgage payments for them.

i have 8 mice that live in the roof of my shed. they come out every afternoon at dusk and wait for me to feed them. they run up to my porch and watch me as i get some meusli for them. they are quite tame.
in my case, they have not grown in population. only if there is an unlimited supply of food will mice populations explode. i am careful not to feed them too much, as they would multiply.
they seem to know that there is just enough food for them all, so they do not breed wildly.

they are clean animals by nature. they always sit on their haunches and lick their front paws and wash their faces and preen themselves while they wait to be fed.
i guess if you live in a neighborhood where there are open garbage bins and stuff, they may be not as clean.

i like my mice just as much as the possums and kookaburras etc that i feed.

anyway, if i had to catch them, i would use a tube where one end is on a table, and the other end is overhanging a plastic bin they can not jump out of.
if you oplace the bait at the end of the tube over hanging the bin like:



sorry the pic is crude but it shows the concept.

get a non-lethal mousetrap.

We had a mouse once. He was so cute but he was eating things in our cabinets and pooping everywere and it just wasn't sanitary. We tried humane traps but he was too smart. He would steal the food out without getting trapped. We ended up having to get a very extra sensitive snap-trap because he was just too clever. We tried to save him

As some others have stated cats would be a great solution. I have 2 and have never seen a mouse in my apartment. I think the mice can smell/sense the cats and avoid my place like the plague. I just don't have the heart to kill them myself.

One of my fellow workers had a koi pond in his backyard. Musk rats chewed through the liner of his pond killing many of his fish. He bought a havaheart trap to catch them. They would climb into the trap, he would catch them and then throw them into the river beside his house drowning them.

http://www.havahart.com/store/live-animal-traps

Dad would kill vermin on sight, no hesitation. A farm girl in the family did the same thing, though she was even more nonchalant about it, and would hold a conversation with you about a totally unrelated topic at the same time. I guess if you couldn't kill easily, you wouldn't last long on an old-style animal farm.

At one time in his life he actually used man-traps (deep pits containing spikes, and a booby trap of large rocks). Luckily he never caught anything - then I fell down one myself (luckily without spikes, so I was more shocked than hurt), and I think that's when he realised how lethal they could be, and not long afterwards he filled them in. He coud never understand my desire to keep animals alive, though I had no problem with his man-traps, apart from thinking he might get jailed.

51% of people who have voted in this poll are evil.

hey i voted for non lethal =/ We have 3 cats though <.<

The early bird catches the worm, but it's the second mouse that takes the cheese!