[Long story, feel free to skip to the end] My house is a tad porous and my backyard is the woods so mice move in from time to time. I get rid of them, it lasts a few months and then I have to do it again. It's one thing to hear them in the walls or attic crawl space but every once in a while they raid the dog food dish. Years ago I found they had been stashing the bits in a stored pair of hiking boots. I went to put the boots on and one was filled to the top with kibbles. (Actually it's Science Diet.) So last night the dogs went vicious, I thought they were attacking each other but when I got to the kitchen where they were trying to get into a space under the counter. They were trying to get at a mouse they smelled, heard and/or saw. I thought I had been noticing the dog food dish emptying when the dogs were sleeping in another room but I wasn't sure. And sometimes they bark at things which are not alive. It was late so I put the crockpot lid over the dog food dish. This morning the previously filled bowl was almost empty! There's no way even dozens of mice devoured that much food, and if there were that many mice I'd have noticed sooner. Somewhere hidden in my house there is a huge stash of kibbles. I should set up a camera and make a YouTube video. There's probably a single mouse stealing one kibble after another all night long.
You might as well set up gerbil tubes all through your house with food for the mice so you can watch them as entertainment.
Mix some peppermint oil with water and put it in a spray bottle and spray your entire house. Mice hate the smell and your house will smell like Christmas. Trust me, it works.
You can also surround your house with moth balls and it helps to keep snakes from crawling in your house.
Man! If only there was some sure fire mouse killing creature. One that had been used for millennia to control mice, and looked great on internet videos.
The other day T thought he had seen a mouse scurry across the floor. I hope it was a hallucination. Haven't seen or heard anything after that, thank goodness. I think the fact that they've learned we feed them has made many of these creatures too lazy to hunt. At one point there were 3 cats and a huge mice problem at our stables. Those lazy cats...
Actually the hunting is instinctual. Veterinary scientists have found that feeding a cat has no effect on hunting. However making the kill takes practice, and once the cat has learned to kill it might not eat what it's slain. The connection between killing something and eating it has to be learned.
Interesting. My mom's cats don't give a crap about hunting the mice either. Sometimes they do kind of play around a bit, but they're still utterly hopeless
What you really want is a rescue. Some cat that got raised in the wild, and then brought out of the cold by the humane society. A cat that's been living on it's own for a couple of years won't take shit from no mice.
For what it's worth, my dogs are Cairn Terrier-Poodle mixes, both breeds I believe were bred as ratters. They are very good at digging up and catching the moles in the yard. The problem is the mice can easily hide where the dogs can't get to.
Sometimes my cats bring in a mouse and play with it. The mouse is often faster than the cats so it gets away. I come home to find a cat staring intently at the space under a bookcase. I wouldn't have any mice in my house if it wasn't for the cats!
You must have amazing eyesight and dexterity... Ginger, are you sure it's mice? That kind of gathering and stashing sounds more like chipmunks to me. They're cute little buggers, but when they get into a house they're a holy terror.
Not sure it really matters, but our female cats have always been better mousers than our males. When I was a kid we lived out in the sticks and had a real problem with mice in the fall and winter. My mom brought home a GIANT Maine Coon from work (she was a vet tech and his owners brought him in to be euthanized just because they didn't want him anymore.) After weeks of no improvement with the mice she finally caught him one day, laying on the kitchen floor, watching while a mouse scurried across the room not 2 feet from his whiskers. After that mom got a female kitten from a friend whose barn cat had a litter and that cat cleaned out the whole house before she turned a year old. Of the cats we have now, the female is a proven mouser. She came from the street and as a kitten she was catching rats bigger than she was. Our youngest cat (who was also a stray though we got him younger) has a lot of enthusiasm, but no skill. As long as your dogs are cool with cats, I don't see while a feline (who doesn't have a pre-existing issue with dogs) can't be acclimated to them. Or if cats are totally out, there are several breeds of dogs that actually make fairly good ratters. Terriers work well of course, but my grandma's dachshund killed quite a few rodents in his time, including my sister's pet rat.
1 or 2 good mousers should cure the problem... plus be cost effective, as they'll be providing much of their own food
Update: one greedy mouse is dead. Fifty cent old fashioned mouse trap with a dab of peanut butter did the trick. I'll have to set another trap up again for a few nights to see if the bugger had accomplices.
There are not that many mice that get in the house. And the cats in this neighborhood are not the top of the food chain, coyotes are. Are you not concerned about house cats killing wild birds?
My dogs see anything small and furry as prey, including cats. Other dogs are all from the enemy clan except those they met before they were about a year old. Those are from the family clan. Sorry about the pet rat. My dogs have killed one rat, 4 moles and one baby bird that ventured into their territory, and one bird and one mole that were within the distance of their leashes and the dogs too quick for me to stop them when we've walked in the woods. It's not that I approve, but sometimes you can't stop them.
Cats might not be such a good idea. Apparently it is a great honor to be presented with a dead mouse by a cat and one that you should thank the cat greatly for. But it would be nice not to discover the dead mouse upon awakening, on the pillow. My cats often bring in birds and frogs and once brought in a chicken. Well a chicken portion anyway, barbecued.
going on previous points about dogs catching mice if cats are out the question. my old dog Klara (who was a Bearded Collie/Lurcher cross) used to catch anything from voles to birds (and seriously, she got one mid flight before, that was rather erm, startling)
