My wife has been hearing things. At first I was alarmed. Then she told me it wasn’t voices telling her to kill me in my sleep. Instead, it was thumps, dragging and scratching sounds. “Did we forget to take our daughter out of timeout in the closet again?” I asked nervously. My wife then informed me the sounds were coming from the crawl space and inside the walls. I breathed a sigh of relief. That eliminated timeout as the issue, and saved us from an awkward talk with Child Protective Services. Since our house wasn’t known to be haunted, I ruled out a poltergeist too. Given how small the access is to the wall with the scratching sounds, I settled on mice as the likely culprit. What follows is our semi-definitive guide to catching mice humanely. Read More
mouse trap
The Post That Will Get Hate Mail: Best Way to Kill a Mouse
No matter how clean you keep your house, if there’s construction or home renovations going on, there’s a good chance you’re going to rattle a few walls, create openings and find yourself coming face to face with a rodent. Now, I really didn’t want to kill anything. I hated the idea – but I hated the idea of mice in my home even more. We tried the humane stuff first – ultra-sonic pest repellents (junk), catch-and-release (futile) – but my compassion for the little guys were dashed when I saw one dart from under the couch I was sitting on, just missing my (bare!!) feet. Uuugh. Time to die, Mickey.
I wanted to do this as quickly, swiftly and efficiently as possible. Poisons and glue traps were out of the question, so I researched the web and found a simple solution to beckon mice toward a snap trap.Read More