Getting rid of mice is not a task left for the faint of heart. It takes both patience and perseverance. A lot of people ask how to get rid of a smart mouse. It really isn’t that you’re dealing with a particularly smart mouse. You just have to know what you’re doing, otherwise getting rid of mice is going to be your worst nightmare (as if it doesn’t rank up there already). Mice aren’t freakishly intelligent, they are just instinctively cautious. You can outsmart that mouse, and I’m going to tell you how.
First thing you need to know about getting rid of mice is LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION!! This saying applies to more than just real estate. It applies to placement of mouse traps too. If you had mice in your kitchen, you wouldn’t only set mouse traps in your garage, would you? NO! You have to set the traps where the mice are and where they’re likely to be. If you’ve detected a trace of mice in your cabinets, then you should set traps inside of your cabinets. You can’t just set one mouse trap and think you’re going to take care of your mouse problem. Experts recommend that you set SIX traps per infested room. If it’s the kitchen, set traps in the cabinets, but also set traps along the sides of walls, in the pantry, beside the refrigerator. The more traps you set, the more area you cover, and the higher the likelihood of actually catching your mice.
The next thing you need to know about is bait. If you don’t use a bait that effectively lures mice to your traps, you’re not going to catch them. You could have placed them in all the right places, but without the right bait, you won’t get their attention. My favorite bait for catching mice is peanut butter. It not only attracts mice, but since it is stick, mice can’t just knock it off the paddle or pick it up. You need to try other baits though as well. It’s important to diversify because if you have a nest of mice, each mouse may be “wired” to look for something else for the family. In addition to baiting some of your traps with peanut butter, bait the traps with what they were eating when you noticed it. For example, if you found them shredding up a box of cheerios, put a couple cheerios on one of the traps. Remember I said that mice are cautious creatures? Well, if they’ve had cheerios for the last week, and they’ve survived up until this point, they will associate that as a safe food source in their mind…. that is until they try to grab the cheerio off your trap – but by then it’s too late.
The last thing you need to know about getting rid of mice is that you have to use a mouse trap that works! It’s great if you’ve done everything right up to this point. You’ve put the traps where they should be, and you’ve used a variety of baits (including a couple with peanut butter)… Good job! Do you have a mouse trap that has a high success rate of catching mice? I bet you didn’t think of that… well, if you’ve gone down the road of trying to catch mice before, and you’re reading this site now, something tells me that somewhere along the line, it didn’t go too well for you. You still have mice. Some of the cheap wooden traps boast a success rate of 60-70%. That means a mouse can come to your trap, but you’re only going to catch it two out of three times. How many misses do you think it’s going to take for a mouse to realize maybe they shouldn’t be sticking their nose in that trap? You know they’re cautious, so probably not too long…
You always hear people talking about building a better mouse trap, well the folks at Snap-E have done just that. It’s called the Snap-E Mouse Trap. I’m not going to drone on and on about how great this trap is because the folks who have used it have already done just that on Amazon – read the reviews! The trap has over 125 reviews and a 4 1/2 stars rating – that means there are a lot of happy customers. For doing something like getting rid of mice, in which success is highly dependent on environmental conditions, that overall rating from that many people is unprecedent. You can buy one Snap-E mouse trap from Amazon for around $5 (more than the wooden traps, yes, but also more effective – remember the saying, “You get what you pay for!”). Don’t get sucked into that trap though because you can get a six pack for less than 25 bucks shipped. That’s exactly what experts recommend for getting rid of mice in one room of your house. Like I said before, if you are interested in getting rid of mice for good – don’t get caught in this feeling that you can set one trap, and that will take care of your mouse problem. Do it right the first time, and you can stop surfing the web for ways to get rid of mice.
Good luck!