LIving In Peace and Harmony with House Mice |
Posted: November 13, 2011 |
Mice and rats are complex, unique individuals with the capacity to experience a wide range of emotions. As highly intelligent as our canine friends, they're natural students who excel at learning and understanding concepts. Mice and rats are often forced into human environments when their natural habitats are lost to development. We owe it to these gentle, social animals to do all that we can to peacefully coexist with them. About Mice and Rats Much like us, mice and rats are highly social creatures. They become attached to each other, love their families, and enjoy playing, wrestling, and sleeping curled up together. Despite the stereotypes of being "dirty" or "diseased," mice and rats are fastidiously clean animals who groom themselves several times a day and are less likely than dogs or cats to catch and transmit parasites and viruses. These nocturnal animals are found throughout North America and are extraordinarily successful in adapting to human environments. Rats can slip into buildings through quarter-size holes, and mice can squeeze into dime-size holes. Did You Know?
'Rodent-Proof' Your Home Keeping rodents from entering your house is the most important step in an integrated rodent-management program—live-trapping rodents will become an endless cycle if you do not rodent-proof the area of concern. You can usually figure out where the animals are entering by carefully observing their behavior—for example, whether the animals always scatter to the same spot when you enter a room where you've seen them before. Eliminating the animals' food source is also crucial. Here are a few basic tips:
Live-Trapping Rats and Mice After rodent-proofing the building, any animals who remain in a building or structure should be live-trapped and released outside. Poisons, sticky glue traps, and snap traps cause rodents and other animals intense suffering and agonizing deaths. Many hardware stores and humane societies carry live mousetraps—PETA also sells live traps for mice—but you can also make an effective, humane mouse trap with a few items around your home:
To live-trap rats, purchase a couple of Havahart Chipmunk Traps #0745 from Tomahawk Live-Trap company and bait them with Trapper's Choice Loganberry Paste, which can be ordered from U-Spray at 1-800-877-7290. To capture rats, spread a dab of peanut butter on a 0.5-inch-by-1-inch wooden block, and place a dab of the Loganberry Paste on top of the peanut butter. Then place the baited block in the back of the trap and set the traps against walls in areas frequented by the rats, i.e., places where you've seen droppings in the past. The traps must be checked hourly and disabled when this isn't possible! Live traps must never be set during cold weather. When a rat is captured, a towel should be placed over the trap to keep the animal calm. Then the captured rat should be transported and released within 100 yards of where they were trapped. (In urban areas, rats can also be euthanized by barbiturate injection by a veterinarian or a qualified animal-shelter technician.) After you've released the animals, make sure all entry points are sealed in order to prevent rats from coming back in, then reset the traps and continue to keep them baited. If the baited traps are set for two weeks without being touched and there are no more signs of rats (i.e., droppings), that's a pretty good indication that the rats have been removed successfully. Mice and rats deserve our compassion and respect, and we must use humane methods to solve problems with rodent "roommates."
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