Build a Better Mousetrap

Hi, I’m going to talk about mice again. It’s getting cold and they are coming inside. You might hear them scratching in your walls. Infuriating! However, do not try to kill them with poison pellets. Learn from my mistakes.

Several years ago, one of my children dropped something into the living room couch, and it immediately slid down past the cushion. I fished around for whatever it was and came out with a handful of D-Con. Two days earlier, I had put a box of D-Con pellets in the cellar. They disappeared overnight, and I thought “Great! Die, mice!” I put out another box, and those pellets vanished too. Yes! Success, or so I thought. But the mice hadn’t eaten those pellets, they had hoarded them. Who hasn’t stumbled across a stash of hoarded food in a box somewhere in the garage or attic? Corn, sunflower seeds, cat food, stashed away for a rainy day by industrious mice. I never realized they might do the same with the D-Con pellets. They had some nerve bringing the poison upstairs into my living room, though!

It gets worse. Months later, I saw something on the stove. It appeared to be three tiny pieces of mouse poop, but…they were green. My stomach sank. I wanted so badly to believe that they weren’t mouse turds and that they definitely weren’t actually green, it was some trick of the lighting, but if they WERE green, surely there was some explanation other than that they were POISON MOUSE TURDS.

I started emptying cupboards. It took a while, but I found it: in the back corner of a large cabinet on the floor along an exterior wall, there were two tidy piles of FREAKING D-CON. In my kitchen. Next to pots and pans and water bottles.

So I will never buy poison pellets again. Bait blocks are safer because mice nibble on those and then return home empty-handed. Of course I still worry: what if my dogs—or any animal, for that matter—eat a poisoned but not-yet-dead mouse? My dogs don’t usually eat rodents, but I worry anyway because that’s my jam. As long as I have dogs, I am done with poison.

Traps are best, especially the plastic jaw traps. Glue traps are horrible. Never use glue traps. The mouse gets stuck: you caught it! Uh, NOW what? Your choices are (1) slowly torture it with starvation and pain while it futilely attempts to rip itself off of the glue board, or (2) finish the job yourself. That means clubbing it, drowning it in a bucket, running over it with your car—there are no good options here. Snap traps are 100 percent the way to go. They aren’t always effective, of course. If the spring is too sensitive, they go off for no reason (dust; crickets). If it’s not sensitive enough, a mouse can lick the bait station clean and walk away without a scratch. As frustrating as that is, though, I’ll never go back to D-Con.