If a pet eats a poisoned mouse or rat it can kill the pet...
Pets have also been known to eat the bait directly.

Our 1 1/2 year old rescue cat is a great pest control device. She is amazing and gets free roam of the house and yard. I'll just let her control the pest for now. She has even eliminated the moles on our ~4 acres. Thats something I could not do in 3 years of attacking them with poison and trapping. Not a single tunnel this year. She brings the dead ones to me to show me, and receives great praise for it.

Does merlot need a brother or sister? If so, you could get:

one of the working terrier/terrorist breeds such as Jack Russel, Patterdale, rat, etc.

a cat

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Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity

DISCLAIMER: These are the author's own personal views and do not represent the views of the author's employer.

First: Try to eliminate as many entries as you can. It's a PITA, and they can get through surprisingly tiny openings, but it has to be done.

Those openings are not only an ingress for mice, but also a variety of other creepy-crawlies (incl. snakes), and they degrade your heating/cooling and moisture control.

Secondly: Traps on the inside, poison outside. My wife put poison outside and in the garage, last fall, and we ended up with only one mouse in the house all season long.

The traps don't even necessarily need to be baited. We place them with the openings up against walls and other places we found, in the past, they run, and they simply run across them and *snap*.

Thirdly: Seal all food up to the best of your ability.

Lastly: It's been our experience early fall when you'll get most of them in the house, as the outside mice are looking for someplace warm to over-winter. We found if can keep them out of the house as the cold approaches, until it gets really cold, we're probably home safe.

It's taken us over 25 years to abate the problem in our late-60's ranch home, but we're pretty much there. I just found another ingress, between attached garage and house, that I sealed up with Great Stuff fire-retardant foam. (Helpfully created several years ago by an electrician we hired that was a hack.)

You can always build a mouse village to give them a more attractive place to live.

Man Builds Mouse Village in His Garden

The posts that refer to them croaking in the walls is right on. My house stunk for weeks when that happened to me.
I use the Feline option. The plus to it: Most crawling bugs and spiders are yummy to my cat.

Glue a cheerio in the middle of the kitchen floor and sit there watching it with a K-22 loaded with rat shot.

quote:

Originally posted by ChicagoSigMan:
You can always build a mouse village to give them a more attractive place to live.

Man Builds Mouse Village in His Garden

My outdoor cat would probably disturb that scenario.

flashguy

quote:

Originally posted by cparktd:
If a pet eats a poisoned mouse or rat it can kill the pet...

It depends on the active ingredient in the rodenticide. Typically the amount that the rodent ate in order to receive a lethal dose would not come close to kill a pet, even a small cat or dog. Again, it depends on the rodenticide and the active ingredient. I have been in the pest control business for 30 years, 22 years as an owner, and this has never happened on any job I performed.

I would not use poison, inside or outside. Live with that smell for a few weeks and you'll never do it again either. And I don't see how using it outside is any guarantee; it doesn't kill them immediately, so the mice that eat poison outside can still come inside to die.

The Tomcat mouse and rat traps work great-are very easy to set and to dispose of the victims without touching anything nasty.

https://www.amazon.com/Tomcat-...a-304497935460&psc=1




Link to original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA6I97kXTao

And as everyone else said, police your food.

quote:

Originally posted by dave7378:

quote:

Originally posted by cparktd:
If a pet eats a poisoned mouse or rat it can kill the pet...

It depends on the active ingredient in the rodenticide. Typically the amount that the rodent ate in order to receive a lethal dose would not come close to kill a pet, even a small cat or dog.

Good to hear. No first hand experience, just repeating what a vet told me.

quote:

Originally posted by cparktd:

quote:

Originally posted by dave7378:

quote:

Originally posted by cparktd:
If a pet eats a poisoned mouse or rat it can kill the pet...

It depends on the active ingredient in the rodenticide. Typically the amount that the rodent ate in order to receive a lethal dose would not come close to kill a pet, even a small cat or dog.

Good to hear. No first hand experience, just repeating what a vet told me.

Very good to know, thanks.

seal all potential access points (i used copper mesh), bait stations around the outside perimeter, traps inside the house. no problem for years now with the house. damage to cars left outside is a different story. have attacked that problem with additional bait stations in that area and traps in the engine bay when The car is left out.

0-0

quote:

Originally posted by 0-0:




0-0

Haha!

Find and kill them outside in the late summer or early fall.

Woodpiles,rock walls, yard debris,sheds,etc.