There is a mouse in the cellar...

During Covid, we put rice, flour etc into the cellar. Seems like it has been discovered, so we removed everything and replaced it with humane mousetraps. Oliver the cat, erstwhile Presidential candidate and serious gourmet, is useless. At 15, he has absolutely no interest, and the cool temperature just made it worse. Two minutes in the cellar, and he joined us upstairs maiowing plaintively. It took a few bites of Bayonne ham, AOC, to shut him up.

I am assuming the mice will do no damage to the wines, but we did go overboard with the traps, with one success to date. We left him at the Rockefeller preserve.

What is a ‘humane mousetrap’?
They all do the deed, but the one’s that snap their neck are the quickest.

Really, just kill it. No need for a guilty conscience. Kill them quickly or you will have a house full. Evolution is the process of critters learning what NOT to do to survive. You will not feel so kindly if a pack of mice chews through your electrical insulation and burns down your house. (a significant percentage of rural house fires are caused by chipmunks and squirrels doing that very thing). It’s us or them.

Or get a younger cat…they have no scruples.

We had a couple mice but my cat made short work of them. Btw cats killing mice isn’t at all humane; they torment them for hours (think of it as a toy that won’t stop playing with them) so I ended up smashing it with a box after watching her chase it for a few minutes.

Catch and release.

Dennis Borczon wrote:
Or get a younger cat…they have no scruples.

Agree with this. Our cat is 5 and he makes short work of any mouse that he finds.

Ed

There are lots of live traps available. One well-known line is Havahart, widely available.
Phil Jones

Jonathan has seen many cellars where mice chewed corks that were actively leaking (not that you have any of those), so yeah, get rid of 'em.

Amusingly, we had some mice in the kitchen last winter. They liked plain but not seasoned breadcrumbs, french but not red lentils, and totally rejected all but the Japanese rice.

geez, and wearing berets while carrying chopsticks? Sounds like fine dinner companions.

Our young boy, too (just under a year old) caught a mouse in our apartment and just walked around a bunch with the critter in his mouth until dropping it on his Ripple Rug(tm, fantastic toy) so that it could run away and he could resume the game.

Some cats are just more white-collar than others, I suppose, and yours is reaching retirement age.

Get the food out of your cellar and you shouldn’t have a problem.

I had rodents chew through foil capsules in a former home.

Not the most appetizing look when you serve the bottles months/years later.

Best trap is a tube coated with poison. Mice run through it, go back home and all lick each other’s fur. Problem solved.

It’s no wonder he’s forsaken the pleasure of raw rodent flesh.

Poison can result in a stinking carcass somewhere you can smell but cannot access. I recommend something like this. Use peanut butter for bait, dispose of the mouse and trap together.
mouse trap.jpg
Also do a once over to outside to see possible entry points for the mouse into your cellar. Go get 'em!

There are electric (battery) traps that do a quick and decisive job on rats/mice !

I should mention that my mother had a nice humane havahart trap. Each time she caught a varmint, she would drop the whole thing into her pond.

Put food/grains in big / strong tubs to avoid pests.

Just use old school mouse/rat traps, they are far swifter than some of the other methods that may cripple/maim the animals, or give them a lingering death.

But note that if you use those kinds of traps, you need to have some kind of safety protocol around those areas, if you have other pets. Our dog, as a puppy, got his paw nipped when I had forgotten about that.

The poisons have a lot of drawbacks IMO. We had another dog eat a whole bowl of rat poison, which didn’t really seem to bother them though.

Just don’t ignore the pests, they can cause tremendous amounts of damage very quickly. I had to redo all the carpets on a car once when mice tore up the interior once.

I think this calls for you to write a ska song!

“There is a mouse in mi cellar…what I’ma gonna do…There is a mouse in mi cellar…what I’ma gonna do…”

“I’m gonna fix that mouse, that’s what I’ma gonna do, I’m gonna fix that mouse…”

For a brief moment there, i thought you meant a human boy [wow.gif]