Mouse Control

Clean your house. Pretty basic. If you don't want to see little furry flashes dart across your kitchen when you turn on the lights, then don't give them a reason to be there. Mice need to eat. If you have mice in your house, it's because there is a food source attracting them. It might not be obvious. You might sweep and mop your kitchen regularly, but when is the last time you moved your oven? Have you looked under your microwave? Do you have pets? How clean is their feeding area? Do you have kids? Do they bring food into their rooms? Eat popcorn on the couch? The possibilities are endless.

Store your food in mouse-proof containers. So, you've cleaned up your act, washed under the stove, and curtailed all crumbs—but there are still mice coming into your house. You need to start going through your pantry and look for permeable containers, like cereal boxes, bags of rice, oatmeal tubes, etc. I guarantee they have chewed their way into some of your dry-storage staples. Also check things like pet food bags, as they love to chew their way into those things too. Transfer your dry goods into mouse-proof tin containers. Even the dry goods stored in closed kitchen cabinets, which seem like they might be safe, are susceptible to a hungry mouse.

Mouse-proof your house. It's pretty difficult to keep a persistent mouse out of your house. They can squeeze through tiny little spaces. They can also chew through wood and expand existing holes. But there are things we can do to make it a little harder for them. Assuming your foundation is concrete, you need to look for gaps around basement windows, doors, cellar doors, and egresses. Seal these gaps and any cracks with caulking and then line them with flashing or hardware cloth if necessary. Sealing up cracks is a good idea anyway for the sake of energy efficiency, but it also helps in the battle against mice.

Set mousetraps. I know they are scary, or rather, they used to be. New spring mousetraps (please don't use those awful sticky traps) are as user-friendly as any killing device can be. I still prefer the old fashioned ones because they are dirt cheap. But they all work just fine and they are a necessary component of any mouse-control scenario. Generally speaking, mousetraps kill a mouse very quickly and humanely. I have seen a few exceptions that involved a screaming paraplegic mouse dragging a trap, along with its lower half, across a floor. But that's pretty rare. Set these traps in areas where you have noticed mouse traffic and use a nice sticky bait like peanut butter.

Don't get complacent. Here is some food for thought: a female mouse becomes sexually mature at two months old and she can have 8–10 litters per year. In each litter a mouse can have as many as fourteen babies. Do some basic math and you can see how a small mouse problem can become an infestation. Not all of these mice would survive, of course, and the whole thing is dependent on a constant food source. Hopefully, this is something that you, having cleaned your house and sealed up all of your storage containers, have made rather difficult for the poor little mouse. If you're lucky she'll move on to greener pastures, or better yet, walk into one of your traps.