Eliminating Mice. How the Pros Do It

There are a million reasons people want to eliminate mice from their home, and each one is just as important as the next.

Mice bring disease, contamination, and destruction while they share the space you inhabit, in fact, mice are considered “commensal rodents” because of the fact that they inhabit the same space as humans, and let’s face it, humans are stingy with their space. Eviction is the only way.

Mice haven’t always been a public enemy, in fact back in the 1700’s in Japan and China mice were bred domestically and the Europeans took a liking to these little guys bring them over and calling them “fancy mice”. These little mice were prized and traded like sports cards are today. they went so far as to establish a National Mouse Club, but I digress.

Fast forward to the year 2018 we know that mice are not as fancy as our ancestors may have thought. We know that mice spread disease like Hantavirus, Lassa Fever, and Plague. They cause hundreds of millions of dollars of loss in the food market and they destroy our homes by gnawing through walls, cabinets, etc. Mice also cause many of the “mystery fires” that occur by gnawing on wires in our homes.

So how do the pros take care of these menacing mice? Well, just like the consumer, we use many of the same devices that are available to you like snap traps, glue boards, and various baits. What we have that is different from a bait perspective is a wide variety of formulations that aren’t available to the public. Soft bait, bait block, pelletized and meal baits, fast acting, and slow acting baits to name a few.

Some things professional pest control companies have that isn’t available to the consumer are products like tracking powder which is a restricted use product and liquid bait like Liqua-Tox. We also have a variety of repellents and live traps.

Having the proper tools or products are important, but it’s knowing what to do with them that is the key. I’ve mentioned this is past blog posts, the mistake that the homeowner makes when trying to do it themselves often times is putting out too little of each product. They will go to the hardware store and buy a pack of snap traps and a five pack of glue traps and they will put them out and hope and pray. Don’t be stingy, put out plenty of snap and glue traps. Look for their droppings and then put out 5 or 10 traps in right there.

The other mistake they make is they put a blob of peanut butter on the snap trap trigger. Mice can smell incredibly well, in fact, they have roughly 1200 genes dedicated to their sniffer, far superior to us humans at 350, so why not make them work for that food on the snap trigger. Put just a smear and make them work to get it. SNAP!

Here is a pro-tip when setting those snap traps, rinse your hands like a madman and then put on some rubber gloves. The mistake is smoking or washing your hands with smelly soap or using hand sanitizer or pumping gas and then setting those traps or putting out bait for that matter. You are transferring that toxic odor onto those products and mice, well, they stick their nose up at those nasty odors. It would be like sitting down to a filet minion that smells like sour milk.

I’m not giving all our tricks away, but one last thing to do is search for areas the mice are entering into your home. Pipes, cables, air conditioner wires, are all possibilities. Garage doors that don’t close flush to the ground. If you can stand in your garage with the lights out and see daylight coming in then a mouse can wiggle in with no problem.

My last word of wisdom is if you don’t want to deal with all this insanity I would recommend hiring a local and professional pest control company, and a quality company comes to mind. Happy hunting!