[Bart.]

We had a mouse in our house a few weeks ago. It was a little gray field mouse with a body about 5-cm long.

To get rid of it, I purchased a live release trap. I baited it with cheese and within a couple of hours, the little creature was in residence. I provided water, a cracker and the next morning, drove a few kms outside of town and released it into a field (as per the trap's instructions).

According to a few people, I did the wrong thing and should have killed it.

But I couldn't because:

- Poison takes seven days to kill the rodent. It causes major internal hemorrhaging and is a painful, inhumane way to take a creature's life; even ones as yucky as rodents. Also, they may die in your walls which leaves an awful stench.

- Years ago, we had a rat move in. We set the traditional quick-kill style traps. The rat not only did not die quickly, it dragged itself along the carpet leaving heavy streaks of blood. My DH removed the body, I had to scrub the blood out of the carpet, which was horrible. I couldn't do that again.

So that left a live trap. Three weeks later, there has been no further sign of a mouse.

What would you have done?

(Disclaimer: we are very tidy people! It's not usual that we have rodents in our house, I promise.)

[*Spikey*]

Stuck a bunch of mouse bait around the house and garage. There is NEVER "just one mouse".

[Frau Farbissina]

People use carbon monoxide from their car exhaust to humanly put indian myna birds to sleep. It's unforntuate that the rat trap did not kill the rat instantly, but IMO that is usually the best, quickest way.

TBH I let DH deal with all aspects of these types of jobs

[RatbagBob]

Ermaghad, Spikey post a warning next time! I'm feeling all sorta tickly now, and not in a good way.

I would be surprised if you only have the one mouse too frankly, they do tend to travel in convoy...

[jellybean icecre...]

I think you did a good thing...and millions of Buddhists and Hindus the world over would agree.

There are plenty that will say that any species that makes a nuisance of itself, preys on native species, depletes natural resources and so forth deserves no mercy. But humans excel at all of those things

[Bart.]

That's what I thought, too. Where there is one, there is more? But there has been no further sign of any rodent since I moved this one on. Nothing at all.

[stopwhiningatme]

I'd have given it some cave aged cheese from the Wookey region, as a kind of last meal thing, and then administered a lethal injection.

[*Spikey*]

Mice are extremely good at not being noticed until they hit plague proportions.

A field mouse is just an outdoor house mouse, BTW. Unless its a native mouse, in which case, its a marsupial, not a mouse. I'm not entirely sure I agree with releasing them to continue breeding though, or shifting the problem elsewhere, because that makes it someone else's problem - the mouse is unlikely to stay in that field.

[PixieVee]

I think you did the right thing. Poor little mousey. If you see more mice you may need to take more action bit it was just one little guy and you haven't seen more so what's the problem?

[Tobias'smum]

we had a mouse we set it free - we have rats in a couple trees - they get poisioned bait before we poisioned them in the time i was pregant we had found 6 dead ones (think neighbour poisioned them ) unfortuanatly DH would leave work early then i would let the dog out for the day he would find them so i would have to get rid of them.

I was tired of them being in the 2 trees so we put poision in there we havent had any since.
Almost everything in the world i am ok with ( non poisiones spiders/snakes mice etc) but i remember living in the NT and a neighbours child being biten - the kid was 3 months old woke up screaming mum runs in there and rat is biting the poor baby i wasnt going to have rats near us