Mice outside coop

Petra Pancake

Songster
Jul 15, 2016
295
130
131
In the suburbs of Tel Aviv
I seem to have a severe mouse problem developing outside my coop. My chickens get their food poured in through a hole (with a lid) in the roof of the coop. A bit of the food often spills and lies around on the roof. For 2-3 weeks now I've seen lots of mouse droppings there. Today some rainwater mixed with the mouse droppings ended up in my eye (ugh). After reading up on mouseborne diseases such as leprospirosis and meningitis I'm ready to get rid of the beasties. Also worried about them attracting predators. But how to get rid of them? First step of course: no more chicken food spills. And then? Are traps efficient outdoors? Don't want to use poison because of my children and also the chickens. Cats - there are lots of feral cats around but somehow they must have overlooked this little mouse restaurant. Do mint and cloves oil work as a deterrent? Any other ideas?
 
Traps work, I can recommend the multi-use traps that can trap and hold many mice. You have to check them every day, and kill the trapees, but unless you have some sort of eradication program in place just you being there feeding the chickens will help mice to explode in population. I always recommend to start setting traps and keep them baited and checked every day. Also remember to place traps where you store your feed. You've probably got them there, as well.

To your list of "diseases to be scared of" that mice carry, I'll add Hanta virus. I don't know if it's on your continent or not, but you know, yikes. It's just a very good idea for EVERYONE to have an eradication program in place for mice. They are ubiquitous.
 
@Zoomie , thanks, I'll look into the trap business then. May sound like a silly question, but - what's the best way to humanely kill the mice I've trapped??
Well, I can't say what the "best" way is. What I've always done is put the multi-trap into a bucket of water, fully submerged. Sometimes I think snap traps are the best because the mouse gets it's neck or back broken, but they only catch one at a time. If you've just trapped 15 mice... well, a bucket of water is probably the fastest.

That said, I know there are electric traps that work with batteries. I have never tried one but probably will. It's way better to find a trap full of DEAD mice, than a trap with 15 live ones, that's for sure, and of course, turning them loose somewhere is not a good idea. You are simply giving your problem to someone else to solve, the animals will suffer because (from their perspective) they've just been dumped on an alien planet and they don't know where anything is, and there are plenty of mice. They are not rare, or anything. It would be like dumping a bunch of cockroaches somewhere. You just would not do it and no one would thank you for it. In fact they might be really upset with you.
 
Anything that kills them instantly is the most humane, IMO. Although this sounds brutal if you simply beat them to death it's over and done with fast, far less suffering than drowning or poison or suffocation. If you can't stand the thought of having to do that you could also invest in an electric trap and just dump them in there 1 or 2 at a time. It works very fast (less than 2 min) and no mess.
 

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