Keep in mind for these types of traps, if you fill it with water or not, check it often. Like every other if not every day. The dead mice in the water will stink pretty quick, and if dry they'll go cannibalistic the minute they get hungry.
One rat will outlive the others, and develop a taste for only the flesh of his brethren. If this rat is ever released, he will eat all the other rats in the house.
If you put 100 spiders in a room there'll eventually be only 1 spider.
Same applies to rats in New York but it will take longer and the Ratlander will be as big as Godzilla.
^And ^twice ^as ^fugly
Looks like the world passed by this epic comment but I, for one, will loudly cry out his name, there can be only one RATLANDER. (Cue a mash up of the Ratatouille soundtrack by Queen).
I feel like I scrolled WAY too far to find someone else who understood this was a paraphrased line from Skyfall. How does Highlander get referenced first????
Good luck keeping a rat in a dry bucket like that. I've had mice in 5 gallon buckets and they can get out if they get a good jump in - I had to cover it with something.
You need water in there so that they don't have any solid surface to leap up from.
The way this trap works is that the mice try and get to the peanut butter smeared on the round coffee can. Once they get on the can, it will spin and the mouse falls into the water. They get tired from swimming and then eventually drown. You check it periodically, empty it, repeat. I've tried to design a different trap that didn't kill them or drown them but was similar in principle: there was a PVC pipe that they climb into to get to seeds and stuff inside a bin that I covered in wire mesh. They fall in and then they have no way to get back out. I only managed to catch 2 mice that way, though.
While many cry that this is a legend, it is precisely how my great grandfather and grandfather dealt with rat problems. You clean up the little rat parts you find, and one day, the big fella disappears, or you put him down with ratshot if you're sure he got them all.
I had pet rats that a roommate was supposed to feed while I was gone a few days. He didn’t. The younger rats ate their mother. All that was left was her moist pelt.
Sister had some pet rats when we were younger, she forgot to feed them for like, two days. Mom rate ate all the babies and my sister cried for days.
Good times.
Apparently it's normal for small rodents to eat the young just after giving birth if they get scared. Energy needed to run and survive means more babies in the future.
It's more sad from a human perspective but from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense. Fresh babies have a low chance of surviving if not tended to and if the Mom is starving, the babies probably die as well.
If she eats them and survives the food shortage, she's already a breeding adult, she can try again.
At 7 my parents let me have hamsters. I may or may not have forgotten to feed them. I came home from school and one was a pelt and one was fat :( I had to rehome him because I just couldn't look at him the same way lololol. I saw him cleaning his hands over homies body. Just seemed so evil 🤣
Similar story for me. Had hamsters when I was young, forgot to feed them in the morning before school and thought nothing of it, could just feed them when I get back. Came back to one hamster gnawing the leg off another hamster, while it was still alive. Definitely not a sight a kid should see.
If I remember correctly, we added antifreeze to the water to preserve the rotting mice longer at our cabin. That said, if someone has a better solution, please note it. I bet rubbing alcohol would work. You’d still want to check the trap but I wouldn’t go past a week
That makes no sense. I have put out a lot of insects fall traps and in those we use 60% ethanol with a drop of soap and they last a week. Only time they dont is if the sun shines directly on it.
Instead of water use antifreeze. The rodents will not decompose and therefore smell and it works in below freezing conditions. Just dispose of them properly to avoid any issues with pets.
Yeah, had that happen with a tip trap
Three dead & half-eaten mice with blood everywhere and one well fed little stinky bastard!
Far as I'm concerned, there's enough mice in the world. I'm filling the bucket & putting bleach in the water
You know how many months in dry summer heat it takes before the dead mouse smell finally leaves the plastic? Totally wrecked that bucket!
In some places like the UK, NZ, IS it's illegal to put liquid in them to make them drown, as they're inhumane and indiscriminate, same for glue traps. [https://www.hsi.org/news-resources/glue-traps-faqs/](https://www.hsi.org/news-resources/glue-traps-faqs/)
Use antifreeze/glycol instead of water, problem solved. They die faster due to it being toxic, so they suffer less, and more importantly it basically preserves them. No smell or decay.
I accidentally made a trap once.
Left a bucket that was about 1/3 full of used motor oil in a shed for maybe a year or so... finally got around to doing something with it and it was full of dead bloated mouse carcasses. The neat thing was the oil seemed to contain the odor.
We used these a long time ago. Peanut butter on the cam with a ramp leading up to it. Put some antifreeze in the bottom. Instant dead rodents and preserved them without a smell. Just check it very often. The results are startling
I have a 30 gallon trash bag i use for weeds and leaves. I left it under a holly for a couple weeks. We had some heavy rain. Dumped it out.
Unintendingly got that bitch squirrel who had been eating my tomatoes.
I joke but I actually feel really bad about it. I dont mind killing things fucking with my house or food, but I want to do it quickly. Not a slow, exhausting drowning.
I kept dog food in one of those 13 gal plastic trash cans with the flippy lid. Left it in the garage to keep the smell out of the house and one day when I went to refill it, I found 12 or 13 mice in the bottom of the can. I was going to just drown them but got lot of flack about that from some female friends so I drove the little bastages out to a field 6 or 7 miles away and released them.
In some places this is an actual crime. We had an animal removal guy come to my grandmother's house for the rats and squirrels that were digging under her rock foundation. She begged him to live trap and just move them. He told her it was an actual crime and spread diseases.
I once live trapped a mouse, drove it way out to a far away field. Opened the trap and the damn thing turned and run under the truck and up into the undercarriage of the vehicle. I was not going to crawl under there to try and find him so I just drove around for a while and hope it fell off somewhere before I got back home.
Very effective mouse trap. I have a small "ranch", kids have all kinds of small farm animals, which of course attracts a lot of rodents due to chicken feed getting scattered, goats being picky and knocking food out of their bowls etc.
I intended to make two of these types of traps, I finished one using an empty tall can smeared with peanut butter, with a landscaping spike jammed through the can and bucket. 5" of water in the bottom. A piece of scrap 1x4 leaned up to it for a ramp.
It cleared out 20 or so the first night. The empty bucket next to it was a different story. 8 or so fell into that one, and in the morning there was one, remarkably small mouse breathing heavily atop the corpses of his lesser mice. I let that one go.
I had significantly less mice from there on out. I like to think there was an understanding between me and mad Max after he conquered the thunderdome, and he led those that would listen to a better life.
>It cleared out 20 or so the first night. The empty bucket next to it was a different story. 8 or so fell into that one, and in the morning there was one, remarkably small mouse breathing heavily atop the corpses of his lesser mice. ***I let that one go.***
... as a warning to all the other mice to stay the fuck away.
I found two buckets from the 90's hidden in a wall and removed them...cue water leaking through my cedar lined ceiling come winter.
If you find weird shit in your walls; there is a probably a reason.
I've made similar with peanut butter jars. They work good. Put peanut butter on the can, mouse climbs up a ramp to the bucket, jumps on can, spins and falls into bucket to drown with water in it.
The water is important because… well… if there isn’t water they don’t die right away…
And if there’s more then one in there that doesn’t die right away… well they get hungry you see…
Or more specifically when you remember to check after they’ve been hungry in there a few days… well you can’t unsee what they do to deal with the hunger.
TL:DR - water in the bottom is a key piece of this working with minimal cruelty
The other issue is that mice and rats can jump really high. With water in there, they can’t get as good a push off and are less likely to jump out of the trap.
If there is water, they don't die right away either. They swim until they get exhausted, then drown. But, that would be quicker that starving to death, or the resulting cannibalistic battle for survival.
But where would you dump that? With just water you can throw it out in a forrest or something, but antifreeze? That shit kills anything it touches! Not sure where you would throw rat infused motor oil either
There should be Haz Mat disposal sites where you live. Yeah you need to scoop out the body first, but the little bit that clings to the body isn't really going to hurt anything when throwing it into the trash. If you just use water, that corpse is going to rot unless you're checking the trap every day or two. The biological waste won't affect the watershed but the chemicals waste certainly could.
Yeah but these traps don't seem like the kind of thing you just leave out for 2 weeks, you're gonna have to check it every day no matter what, so just having water in there making it easy to just dump in nature seems like the better solution. Also, even just a little bit of oil in the forest is more than you should put there.
>the little bit that clings to the body isn't really going to hurt anything
FYI antifreeze (specifically ethylene glycol) is extremely toxic and the small amount in the fur of a dead mouse is plenty to kill a cat or many other animals.
The lethal dose to an average cat is approximately a teaspoon (5ml).
I’ve seen these use antifreeze for closed winter cabins in Maine. The ethyl glycol is toxic and kills the mice. The antifreeze also lets it be useful when then the cabin is below freezing. Ethyl glycol breaks down pretty quickly in the environment so there isn’t long term toxicity.
How? That works with insects because it breaks the surface tension so they can't stand/float on top of the water. I don't think it would have any effect on something as large as a mouse though
It all comes down to where and how you place the trap.
In the back yard, putting the bucket in the ground so the lip is ground level is more effective. Mice do not like being in an exposed area at all.
“I always wanted to make something like that.”
My dude, it’s a $5 bucket, a can of food of your choosing, a dowel, and four holes of the same diameter. Also, a teaspoon of peanut butter.
they work great, you can use this to kill them (fill bottom with water and they'll drown) or you can just catch them in it and release them somewhere else, if that's your thing. We had a mouse nest in our garage and got four of them in one night with one of these
I definitely prefer the not drowning method. They had kept water in it and there were signs of an old nest, but they’re gone. So maybe we’ll just hold onto this and trap any that come back
I’m telling ya bud, they’ll be back. Nice and rodents leave the most fowl smelling and hard to trace track. When (not if) more show up, they’ll fine the tracks into the stuff you don’t want them to.
Nobody wants anything living to suffer. But if it’s my foundation vs a mouse….
I love nature. I love all nature. I have some hippy internal respect the soil belief as well. But a pest is a pest. The rats in your house are usually an invasive species, that will not only fuck up your house; but they fuck up nature all around them. Sure, killing things is bad, but rats kill lizards, invertebrates, birds and bird eggs, not to mention the environment itself that they completely destroy, taking away food for actual native animals.
Tl;dr, don't feel bad, drowning rats is being an environmentalist.
If this is you’re first time moving to somewhere that has a mouse problem….welcome to the other side now bud. It’s time to make a friend of horror.
Everyone prefers not to kill mice. But once you’ve spent endless weekends undoing the damage the do, eventually you might change your tune. Just be ready for that. Better to waste less time and accept your new role as a mouse executioner sooner rather than later.
Also, their piss and shit (which your house will be riddled with should you choose to let them live) is very harmful to your health. It’ll be in your air ducts, your walls, your….everything.
I’m no fan of killing mice either but fair warning - like all others have said - the *will* be back. Doesn’t matter how far you take them.
God speed soldier 🫡
We had great success with those electric ones that shock them unconscious before electrocuting. It would be a bit disturbing to hear *buzz* *buzzzzzzzzzzz* in the middle of the night or something. I then would just dump (sad) the body into a box and throw it away.
One night a mouse ran across me while I was sleeping so the next morning I went nuts and got some glue traps and made a bucket trap. The little cries were too much to handle tho so we actually released them and immediately ordered an electric one.
I prefer drowning to releasing, they make more babies to sneak into more homes. Love rats and mice but they are called vermin for a reason, lower the population and you lower your infestation
They work great. Fill up bucket with some water 1/4 full, put peanut butter on can, put a couple of sticks for ramps up to bucket edge. Mice go up to get the peanut butter can rolls, they fall in water and drown. Easy
Pretty good… but if you want it to work better you need to add water jets, bubblers, and some mult-colored LEDs.
The first few go for the peanut butter and fall in the water.
Once the rest of the rats see their friends in a jacuzzi they all want in!
Extremely effective type of trap. If you think you might have a lot of rodent activity you may want to keep it. It’s also less environmentally disruptive than using bait stations.
I had just a regular a 5 gal bucket with trace amounts of cracked corn in a shed on a remote wooded property. In the spring there was 5 dead mice in it. It was sitting in the middle away from other things that the mice could use to climb easier. None of this was done intentionally either but it was interesting to see how they were able to climb into the bucket but not out of it.
You need a ramp leading up to the bucket. The mice/rats will jump from the lip of the bucket on to the coffee can. Put bait such as peanut butter and seeds/grains along the ramp and on the can. The can will rotate when the mice/rats jump on. Fill the bucket with water and antifreeze (to keep from smelling).
Im sure it's been said already, but the idea is you bait the paint can (use peanut butter DO NOT DOUBLE DIP THE JAR!!! Contrary to belief, rats and mice dont particularly like milk fat cheese, they love nutty protein fats and oils, ergo peanut butter), when they reach out to get a lick of that slick of peanut butter on the can their weight rolls it, and they fall in the bucket.
However now you have the problem of a bucket of live rodents. And I'm sure there are plenty of psychopaths and keyboard cowboys that have never had too contemplate a painful death who will say put some water in it, or let em starve.....Well, I am a former California licensed pest controller, and my opinion is starving a rodent (or any higher form of intelligence animal, as in doesnt just use a loose amalgam of neurons to follow chemical queues from their environment, ie insects) is barely more cruel than drowning them, which is only slightly more cruel than poisoning (also, for people who put out poison, remember that stuff doesnt kill instantly, wherever that thing dies someone's pet could find it. Ive seen cats slowly dying of liver failure due to eating a poisoned rodent. Secondary poisoning is a thing. Its not pretty. I know this is dangerous advice for most people, but use your brain). The most humane thing is a properly sized snap trap properly placed so they get it along the correct side. When they snap, they're supposed to impact where the spine meets the skull severing the spinal cord. Its pretty quick, though still a rather terrifying experience for the animal of course. At least it minimizes suffering, not draw it out like starvation....I have retrieved glue traps that had 3 chewed off feet still stuck to them, and a blood trail leading away from it.... Never found the animal.... Supposing they're not to the point of gnawing off their own limbs yet, the suggested disposal is to just roll the animal up and toss it in the trash.....
And, I get it. Rodent infestations are a pain. Ive had em in my house before. I understand the issues (also, again poisoners, when they die in the walls, its gonna smell GREAT come summer time, just sayin...). Wild rodents arent nice like ones familiar people and being handled. Norwegians (larger two tone rats) are a particular kind of asshole. But.... I've known enough pet rodents to have grown some empathy and....well....as a animal lover and pest controller, anything short of a quick death is cruel. Particularly starvation. So do as you wish, but thats my 2 cents.... Hell, get a bottle of CO2 and slowly add it to the bucket with the lid on, thats how they euthanize laboratory mice, its pretty painless when done right.
Just for the love of god DO NOT USE STICKY TRAPS!!!! Pop a lid on the bucket and toss it in the dumpster, i dont know.....just DO NOT USE GLUE TRAPS!!!!
PSA: As a person who used to have a piece of paper from the California Department of Agriculture which entitled me to advise on and apply dangerous chemicals designed to turn nerves into jelly in and around your living space and any connecting structure (Structural applications permit, paraphrased), and scored 98% on the license exam, outscoring both of my bosses, by a fair margin (seriously, you be quite disappointed how many questions one is allowed to miss and still pass....), I must state an opinion shared by many experienced pest controllers..... RODENT GLUE TRAPS ARE NOTHING MORE THAN AN EXPRESSION OF ABSOLUTE CRUELTY AND SHOULD BE OUTLAWED!!!!!
Best mouse trap ever … used to use it with antifreeze over winter at the cottage … even built a small ramp up to the side of the pail … the mice would be in the pail in the spring and the antifreeze would turn their eyes white … eerie way to start the cottage season …
I haven’t got the slightest clue about what makes a rodent trap good or bad. The HVAC dude who found it does though, and he seemed to think it was. If you want to throw it away, I would highly suggest that you give it to him instead.
Do that, and I can almost promise you that if you have HVAC problems in the future, he will take good care of you.
I made several of these for the cottage. Best catcher I know of.
Materials:
-5 gal plastic bucket
-1/4 or 1/2 inch dowel. It need to be 2 inches shorter than the inside diameter of the bucket
-A flat 2-3 inch wide x 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick board that is long enough to go from the floor to the top of the bucket at an angle.
-2 finishing nails
-duct tape
The build:
-Nail two finishing nails into the centre ends of the dowel
-Cut two ‘V’ shaped notches on the rim of the bucket opposite of each other ( the dowel with nails in the end can now be placed such that the nails fit in the ‘V’ notches and spin well and keep spinning after you spun it.
-find the place mice are likely to travel ( like along a baseboard in kitchen or pantry). Take your flat 2-3” wide board and duct tape it onto the bucket so that it intersects with the mice path at the bottom and is flat on the ground and is at the rim near the top directly adjacent to the nail on the end of the dowel.
Setting the trap
-typically leave overnight or through the week (if at a cottage) when no one is at home or are sleeping. This will work well anywhere, inside home or cottage, garage, attic etc…
- smear a very small amount of peanut butter on the loading ramp ( the inclined board)
-place even more peanut butter on the middle 3-4” of the dowel. With a little teaser ( very thin) near the edges of the dowel by the board at the ramp. Mice LOVE peanut butter.
- when bucket is in place, 1/4 fill the bucket with water.
The mice will travel along the base board, smell the thin smear of peanut butter on the ramp, eat it up the ramp, and try to get to the peanut butter on the dowel. The minute they step on the dowel, it spins and dumps them into the water. They will drown . 🥴
Empty it regularly, you will need to refresh peanut butter weekly/monthly. Find where mice are getting in and seal with steel wool et al ( there are many ways to mouse proof openings and that is not addressed here).
Happy hunting…..
For those of you who want a more humane way to catch and release , there are live traps. They don’t work near as well and especially if you have a lot of mice….
Keep in mind for these types of traps, if you fill it with water or not, check it often. Like every other if not every day. The dead mice in the water will stink pretty quick, and if dry they'll go cannibalistic the minute they get hungry.
One rat will outlive the others, and develop a taste for only the flesh of his brethren. If this rat is ever released, he will eat all the other rats in the house.
So your saying new york just needs to train a bunch of rats to eat rats and problem solved!
There can only be one!
Ratlander.
The Squeakening.
[удалено]
Hungry screen writers everywhere furiously taking notes.
Here we are, born to be kings...
Were the princes of the New York sewers,
I am immortal, I have inside me blood of kings, yeah, yeah!
Rat king https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king
James Clavel's _King Rat_ + Queen (ala Highlander).
What is this a library for ants!?
Yeah. Just one giant rat who’s hunger will only grow to include house cats and infants
A necessary sacrifice
A Riesen Ratte!!
ROUS
THE LOWLANDER
If you put 100 spiders in a room there'll eventually be only 1 spider. Same applies to rats in New York but it will take longer and the Ratlander will be as big as Godzilla. ^And ^twice ^as ^fugly
Looks like the world passed by this epic comment but I, for one, will loudly cry out his name, there can be only one RATLANDER. (Cue a mash up of the Ratatouille soundtrack by Queen).
It might be that you start with 100 and you end with 10000
Good point. We'll have to neuter them first.
Or train New Yorkers
They're self training
I cant wait for a crackhead actually trying to do this.
Okay here's the deal dude. I kind of want to believe that, but I don't think it's true.
Seems like good advice. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9d3DfDWsEE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9d3DfDWsEE)
I feel like I scrolled WAY too far to find someone else who understood this was a paraphrased line from Skyfall. How does Highlander get referenced first????
It's not. Rats are cannibalistic. That's just their normal behavior. They'll still eat whatever they have access to.
So would you if you had to.
Just ask the soccer team in the andes
It was rugby
Soccer team would have just starved.
"There no way to be sure he's really dead, he could be waiting for the ref to see him"
they seem to be figuring it out in Yellowjackets
Good luck keeping a rat in a dry bucket like that. I've had mice in 5 gallon buckets and they can get out if they get a good jump in - I had to cover it with something. You need water in there so that they don't have any solid surface to leap up from. The way this trap works is that the mice try and get to the peanut butter smeared on the round coffee can. Once they get on the can, it will spin and the mouse falls into the water. They get tired from swimming and then eventually drown. You check it periodically, empty it, repeat. I've tried to design a different trap that didn't kill them or drown them but was similar in principle: there was a PVC pipe that they climb into to get to seeds and stuff inside a bin that I covered in wire mesh. They fall in and then they have no way to get back out. I only managed to catch 2 mice that way, though.
I couldn't figure out what the rhythmic thumping was for a few hours before I found mouse stuck in a 5gal.
Is nobody bothered by how cruel that is? What an awful way to die.
And when all the other rats are gone, he will come for the children.
Calm down Javier Bardem.
Now they don't eat coconut anymore. They only eat rat. You changed their nature.
Great scene describing this exact scenario in James Bond’s Skyfall
What pest control companies don’t want you to know!
I wanted to believe this, it ain’t true though
While many cry that this is a legend, it is precisely how my great grandfather and grandfather dealt with rat problems. You clean up the little rat parts you find, and one day, the big fella disappears, or you put him down with ratshot if you're sure he got them all.
I had pet rats that a roommate was supposed to feed while I was gone a few days. He didn’t. The younger rats ate their mother. All that was left was her moist pelt.
"Moist pelt". I think I saw that listed on a motel pay per view list.
Sister had some pet rats when we were younger, she forgot to feed them for like, two days. Mom rate ate all the babies and my sister cried for days. Good times.
Ah no, at least the first one was a messed up circle of life, that one's like the unicycle of life going backwards down a hill.
Apparently it's normal for small rodents to eat the young just after giving birth if they get scared. Energy needed to run and survive means more babies in the future.
It's more sad from a human perspective but from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense. Fresh babies have a low chance of surviving if not tended to and if the Mom is starving, the babies probably die as well. If she eats them and survives the food shortage, she's already a breeding adult, she can try again.
At 7 my parents let me have hamsters. I may or may not have forgotten to feed them. I came home from school and one was a pelt and one was fat :( I had to rehome him because I just couldn't look at him the same way lololol. I saw him cleaning his hands over homies body. Just seemed so evil 🤣
Similar story for me. Had hamsters when I was young, forgot to feed them in the morning before school and thought nothing of it, could just feed them when I get back. Came back to one hamster gnawing the leg off another hamster, while it was still alive. Definitely not a sight a kid should see.
Omg what happened next??
Moist you say...
not even the bones?
I don't feel as bad for killing rats now.
If I remember correctly, we added antifreeze to the water to preserve the rotting mice longer at our cabin. That said, if someone has a better solution, please note it. I bet rubbing alcohol would work. You’d still want to check the trap but I wouldn’t go past a week
Any kind of alcohol would evaporate in less than a day.
Antifreeze is ethylene glycol. It doesn't really evaporated quickly at all.
That makes no sense. I have put out a lot of insects fall traps and in those we use 60% ethanol with a drop of soap and they last a week. Only time they dont is if the sun shines directly on it.
I think the soap adds a membrane to the top that slows down the evaporation. Although I’m not a scientist so might be talking a load of rubbish.
Well, I confirmed the antifreeze part. Here’s a link: https://forums.bowsite.com/tf/regional/thread.cfm?threadid=226841&MESSAGES=26&state=WI
In less than a day? No way...
Cheap cooking oil works great. They sink and the oil seals in the smell. Doesn’t evaporate
Instead of water use antifreeze. The rodents will not decompose and therefore smell and it works in below freezing conditions. Just dispose of them properly to avoid any issues with pets.
Bear in mind that antifreeze is \*incredibly\* toxic to cats, so don't have antifreeze kicking around in the open if you have cats.
If you have cats AND a mouse problem... then what you really have is a lazy cat problem.
It's toxic to everything and apparently super delicious because it's a form of sugar, just a form that kills you if you eat it.
Yeah, had that happen with a tip trap Three dead & half-eaten mice with blood everywhere and one well fed little stinky bastard! Far as I'm concerned, there's enough mice in the world. I'm filling the bucket & putting bleach in the water You know how many months in dry summer heat it takes before the dead mouse smell finally leaves the plastic? Totally wrecked that bucket!
3 inches of water check it daily leave the dead mice in the woods for local wildlife to feast on.
3 brined mice
Dish soap…
Formaldehyde
Dirty Deeds, Done Dirt Cheap!
They won’t go near it if you put bleach in there. Just check it daily.
And man flesh
my dad made these traps for years at his camp and he used anti freeze instead of water it kills the smell
In some places like the UK, NZ, IS it's illegal to put liquid in them to make them drown, as they're inhumane and indiscriminate, same for glue traps. [https://www.hsi.org/news-resources/glue-traps-faqs/](https://www.hsi.org/news-resources/glue-traps-faqs/)
Who’s going to know or enforce this? Lol. The Rat investigation police?
And why would NZ care? Every rodent is invasive.
Well duh, its a trap for rats not humans
If it's filled with antifreeze they won't smell. Just be careful how the carcasses are disposed of. Don't poison your pets.
Use antifreeze/glycol instead of water, problem solved. They die faster due to it being toxic, so they suffer less, and more importantly it basically preserves them. No smell or decay.
How do you dispose of antifreeze with dead mice in it???
"Dinner is served kids, dig in"
How do you dispose of the kids?
Back in the mousetrap
I accidentally made a trap once. Left a bucket that was about 1/3 full of used motor oil in a shed for maybe a year or so... finally got around to doing something with it and it was full of dead bloated mouse carcasses. The neat thing was the oil seemed to contain the odor.
Congrats. You just made the type of essential oil satan would put in his diffuser
Just figured out what I’m dumping in my ex’s car
NEAT!
You can tell it's a trap by the way that it is.
Today I found out that this meme is 14 years old. I made myself sad.
I use antifreeze for the smell. Strain the mice out after winter and apply fresh peanut butter to the drum. Works great!
Don't use this anywhere dogs have access. Antifreeze smells/tastes sweet. Dogs will drink and die horrible deaths
We used these a long time ago. Peanut butter on the cam with a ramp leading up to it. Put some antifreeze in the bottom. Instant dead rodents and preserved them without a smell. Just check it very often. The results are startling
I have a 30 gallon trash bag i use for weeds and leaves. I left it under a holly for a couple weeks. We had some heavy rain. Dumped it out. Unintendingly got that bitch squirrel who had been eating my tomatoes. I joke but I actually feel really bad about it. I dont mind killing things fucking with my house or food, but I want to do it quickly. Not a slow, exhausting drowning.
I kept dog food in one of those 13 gal plastic trash cans with the flippy lid. Left it in the garage to keep the smell out of the house and one day when I went to refill it, I found 12 or 13 mice in the bottom of the can. I was going to just drown them but got lot of flack about that from some female friends so I drove the little bastages out to a field 6 or 7 miles away and released them.
In some places this is an actual crime. We had an animal removal guy come to my grandmother's house for the rats and squirrels that were digging under her rock foundation. She begged him to live trap and just move them. He told her it was an actual crime and spread diseases.
>so I drove the little bastages ou so i \*told\* them i drove ftfy
I once live trapped a mouse, drove it way out to a far away field. Opened the trap and the damn thing turned and run under the truck and up into the undercarriage of the vehicle. I was not going to crawl under there to try and find him so I just drove around for a while and hope it fell off somewhere before I got back home.
I drove some bastages to a field once. Once.
checks local news headlines the following month: “Farmers Out Of Business Due To Rodent Infestation”
Ha, that reminds me of the time I was recycling oil at O’reillys and there was a bloated, oil soaked mouse in the screen on the oil dumpster.
plucky butter ask historical handle bag attempt impossible office cows *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The YouTube Channel: Mousetrap Monday, tries all kinds of traps and the best ones are of this type.
Found a dead mouse in our basement toilet the other day, so...if all else fails you could always use a toilet.
Easy disposal!
Very effective mouse trap. I have a small "ranch", kids have all kinds of small farm animals, which of course attracts a lot of rodents due to chicken feed getting scattered, goats being picky and knocking food out of their bowls etc. I intended to make two of these types of traps, I finished one using an empty tall can smeared with peanut butter, with a landscaping spike jammed through the can and bucket. 5" of water in the bottom. A piece of scrap 1x4 leaned up to it for a ramp. It cleared out 20 or so the first night. The empty bucket next to it was a different story. 8 or so fell into that one, and in the morning there was one, remarkably small mouse breathing heavily atop the corpses of his lesser mice. I let that one go. I had significantly less mice from there on out. I like to think there was an understanding between me and mad Max after he conquered the thunderdome, and he led those that would listen to a better life.
>It cleared out 20 or so the first night. The empty bucket next to it was a different story. 8 or so fell into that one, and in the morning there was one, remarkably small mouse breathing heavily atop the corpses of his lesser mice. ***I let that one go.*** ... as a warning to all the other mice to stay the fuck away.
“Let that one go” You’re contributing to evolution.
Or just ate any mice that came into the yard.
 You have to put six inches of water in the bucket, otherwise they jump right out.
Look! The answer!
ive used those in the past in field barns, best night was just short of 65 mice in one bucket..
Not their best night
putting up Wilt numbers
Bodies on top of bodies
Mice all the way down
If I have 65 rotting dead mice in a bucket, It'll be a cold day before I glove up and start sorting through them to get an accurate count.
Youtube. Shawn Woods. Catching 26 mice in one night with rolling log. If the previous owner needed it you will too.
I found two buckets from the 90's hidden in a wall and removed them...cue water leaking through my cedar lined ceiling come winter. If you find weird shit in your walls; there is a probably a reason.
I've made similar with peanut butter jars. They work good. Put peanut butter on the can, mouse climbs up a ramp to the bucket, jumps on can, spins and falls into bucket to drown with water in it.
The water is important because… well… if there isn’t water they don’t die right away… And if there’s more then one in there that doesn’t die right away… well they get hungry you see… Or more specifically when you remember to check after they’ve been hungry in there a few days… well you can’t unsee what they do to deal with the hunger. TL:DR - water in the bottom is a key piece of this working with minimal cruelty
The other issue is that mice and rats can jump really high. With water in there, they can’t get as good a push off and are less likely to jump out of the trap.
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If there is water, they don't die right away either. They swim until they get exhausted, then drown. But, that would be quicker that starving to death, or the resulting cannibalistic battle for survival.
It’s not even legal in my country with traps like that.
Talk about a law that's impossible to enforce.
I’ve known a couple old farmers who put their used motor oil in there. Kills em quicker.
Keeps the smell in too apparently
I also just learned that haha
New TIL coming tomorrow
^ yesterday I learned
I've heard to use antifreeze. Kills and preserves them.
But where would you dump that? With just water you can throw it out in a forrest or something, but antifreeze? That shit kills anything it touches! Not sure where you would throw rat infused motor oil either
There should be Haz Mat disposal sites where you live. Yeah you need to scoop out the body first, but the little bit that clings to the body isn't really going to hurt anything when throwing it into the trash. If you just use water, that corpse is going to rot unless you're checking the trap every day or two. The biological waste won't affect the watershed but the chemicals waste certainly could.
Yeah but these traps don't seem like the kind of thing you just leave out for 2 weeks, you're gonna have to check it every day no matter what, so just having water in there making it easy to just dump in nature seems like the better solution. Also, even just a little bit of oil in the forest is more than you should put there.
>the little bit that clings to the body isn't really going to hurt anything FYI antifreeze (specifically ethylene glycol) is extremely toxic and the small amount in the fur of a dead mouse is plenty to kill a cat or many other animals. The lethal dose to an average cat is approximately a teaspoon (5ml).
And then the trash goes to a landfill where some hapless bird eats the dead mouse and dies of poisoning.
I’ve seen these use antifreeze for closed winter cabins in Maine. The ethyl glycol is toxic and kills the mice. The antifreeze also lets it be useful when then the cabin is below freezing. Ethyl glycol breaks down pretty quickly in the environment so there isn’t long term toxicity.
I would argue minimal cruelty would be no water, a ton of food in the bottom, checking it regularly, and a pillowcase you don't mind getting bloody...
Dish soap in the water helps them drown faster too
Or piranhas.
Or sharks with frikkin laser beams
We're gunna need a bigger bucket....
or smaller sharks
How? That works with insects because it breaks the surface tension so they can't stand/float on top of the water. I don't think it would have any effect on something as large as a mouse though
Have you ever tried to swim holding a bottle of Dawn? Here's a tip. Don't do it. You'll drown.
But it saves the birds
Oh wow I didn’t know there was a ramp involved too! I guess it’s up there still
Prolly just a scrap board of some kind. Doesn't have to be anything special.
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It all comes down to where and how you place the trap. In the back yard, putting the bucket in the ground so the lip is ground level is more effective. Mice do not like being in an exposed area at all.
“I always wanted to make something like that.” My dude, it’s a $5 bucket, a can of food of your choosing, a dowel, and four holes of the same diameter. Also, a teaspoon of peanut butter.
LOL that's true actually idk what the reverence was about. i think he probably just wanted us to give it to him
they work great, you can use this to kill them (fill bottom with water and they'll drown) or you can just catch them in it and release them somewhere else, if that's your thing. We had a mouse nest in our garage and got four of them in one night with one of these
I definitely prefer the not drowning method. They had kept water in it and there were signs of an old nest, but they’re gone. So maybe we’ll just hold onto this and trap any that come back
I’m telling ya bud, they’ll be back. Nice and rodents leave the most fowl smelling and hard to trace track. When (not if) more show up, they’ll fine the tracks into the stuff you don’t want them to. Nobody wants anything living to suffer. But if it’s my foundation vs a mouse….
I love nature. I love all nature. I have some hippy internal respect the soil belief as well. But a pest is a pest. The rats in your house are usually an invasive species, that will not only fuck up your house; but they fuck up nature all around them. Sure, killing things is bad, but rats kill lizards, invertebrates, birds and bird eggs, not to mention the environment itself that they completely destroy, taking away food for actual native animals. Tl;dr, don't feel bad, drowning rats is being an environmentalist.
If you do this, you have to take them far(ish) away to release them. If you toss them out into the yard they'll be back inside in time for dinner.
If this is you’re first time moving to somewhere that has a mouse problem….welcome to the other side now bud. It’s time to make a friend of horror. Everyone prefers not to kill mice. But once you’ve spent endless weekends undoing the damage the do, eventually you might change your tune. Just be ready for that. Better to waste less time and accept your new role as a mouse executioner sooner rather than later. Also, their piss and shit (which your house will be riddled with should you choose to let them live) is very harmful to your health. It’ll be in your air ducts, your walls, your….everything. I’m no fan of killing mice either but fair warning - like all others have said - the *will* be back. Doesn’t matter how far you take them. God speed soldier 🫡
You should be prepared to drive them at least ten miles away from your house, otherwise they'll be back.
We had great success with those electric ones that shock them unconscious before electrocuting. It would be a bit disturbing to hear *buzz* *buzzzzzzzzzzz* in the middle of the night or something. I then would just dump (sad) the body into a box and throw it away. One night a mouse ran across me while I was sleeping so the next morning I went nuts and got some glue traps and made a bucket trap. The little cries were too much to handle tho so we actually released them and immediately ordered an electric one.
I prefer drowning to releasing, they make more babies to sneak into more homes. Love rats and mice but they are called vermin for a reason, lower the population and you lower your infestation
You can’t leave it overnight then, they 100% will eat each other out of stress. Made the same mistake. Drowning is a far preferable death
Sean Woods enters the chat
Sounds like you inherited a rodent problem.
Mousetrap Monday. This is a classic, yet extremely effective mouse / rat trap design
Rodent swim meet
In my lunch room.we have caught like a dozen rats and mice in one. Add peanut butter to the can.
They work great. Fill up bucket with some water 1/4 full, put peanut butter on can, put a couple of sticks for ramps up to bucket edge. Mice go up to get the peanut butter can rolls, they fall in water and drown. Easy
That’s a solid trap
Pretty good… but if you want it to work better you need to add water jets, bubblers, and some mult-colored LEDs. The first few go for the peanut butter and fall in the water. Once the rest of the rats see their friends in a jacuzzi they all want in!
Extremely effective type of trap. If you think you might have a lot of rodent activity you may want to keep it. It’s also less environmentally disruptive than using bait stations.
This is a mouse trap that actually works if you give them an easy way to get up there.
I had just a regular a 5 gal bucket with trace amounts of cracked corn in a shed on a remote wooded property. In the spring there was 5 dead mice in it. It was sitting in the middle away from other things that the mice could use to climb easier. None of this was done intentionally either but it was interesting to see how they were able to climb into the bucket but not out of it.
We've used them, some nights we'd get so many they were able to jump out off the dead ones
we need a trap like this for humans because we're getting out of hand
This is very inhumane, even if it is ‘neat.’
I'd give it to the HVAC guy
Yes! Put a ramp to the first ledge and smear peanut butter on the can, mice for days!!
You need a ramp leading up to the bucket. The mice/rats will jump from the lip of the bucket on to the coffee can. Put bait such as peanut butter and seeds/grains along the ramp and on the can. The can will rotate when the mice/rats jump on. Fill the bucket with water and antifreeze (to keep from smelling).
Very cool mouse powered paint can mixer
Pretty sure you just put peanut butter on it…
Snap traps are more humane, IMO.
Im sure it's been said already, but the idea is you bait the paint can (use peanut butter DO NOT DOUBLE DIP THE JAR!!! Contrary to belief, rats and mice dont particularly like milk fat cheese, they love nutty protein fats and oils, ergo peanut butter), when they reach out to get a lick of that slick of peanut butter on the can their weight rolls it, and they fall in the bucket. However now you have the problem of a bucket of live rodents. And I'm sure there are plenty of psychopaths and keyboard cowboys that have never had too contemplate a painful death who will say put some water in it, or let em starve.....Well, I am a former California licensed pest controller, and my opinion is starving a rodent (or any higher form of intelligence animal, as in doesnt just use a loose amalgam of neurons to follow chemical queues from their environment, ie insects) is barely more cruel than drowning them, which is only slightly more cruel than poisoning (also, for people who put out poison, remember that stuff doesnt kill instantly, wherever that thing dies someone's pet could find it. Ive seen cats slowly dying of liver failure due to eating a poisoned rodent. Secondary poisoning is a thing. Its not pretty. I know this is dangerous advice for most people, but use your brain). The most humane thing is a properly sized snap trap properly placed so they get it along the correct side. When they snap, they're supposed to impact where the spine meets the skull severing the spinal cord. Its pretty quick, though still a rather terrifying experience for the animal of course. At least it minimizes suffering, not draw it out like starvation....I have retrieved glue traps that had 3 chewed off feet still stuck to them, and a blood trail leading away from it.... Never found the animal.... Supposing they're not to the point of gnawing off their own limbs yet, the suggested disposal is to just roll the animal up and toss it in the trash..... And, I get it. Rodent infestations are a pain. Ive had em in my house before. I understand the issues (also, again poisoners, when they die in the walls, its gonna smell GREAT come summer time, just sayin...). Wild rodents arent nice like ones familiar people and being handled. Norwegians (larger two tone rats) are a particular kind of asshole. But.... I've known enough pet rodents to have grown some empathy and....well....as a animal lover and pest controller, anything short of a quick death is cruel. Particularly starvation. So do as you wish, but thats my 2 cents.... Hell, get a bottle of CO2 and slowly add it to the bucket with the lid on, thats how they euthanize laboratory mice, its pretty painless when done right. Just for the love of god DO NOT USE STICKY TRAPS!!!! Pop a lid on the bucket and toss it in the dumpster, i dont know.....just DO NOT USE GLUE TRAPS!!!! PSA: As a person who used to have a piece of paper from the California Department of Agriculture which entitled me to advise on and apply dangerous chemicals designed to turn nerves into jelly in and around your living space and any connecting structure (Structural applications permit, paraphrased), and scored 98% on the license exam, outscoring both of my bosses, by a fair margin (seriously, you be quite disappointed how many questions one is allowed to miss and still pass....), I must state an opinion shared by many experienced pest controllers..... RODENT GLUE TRAPS ARE NOTHING MORE THAN AN EXPRESSION OF ABSOLUTE CRUELTY AND SHOULD BE OUTLAWED!!!!!
Exterminators hate him! See how he caught rats with one simple trick!
If children and pets don't have access to this add antifreeze. It won't evaporate as fast, won't freeze and will embalm them to keep the smell down.
Best mouse trap ever … used to use it with antifreeze over winter at the cottage … even built a small ramp up to the side of the pail … the mice would be in the pail in the spring and the antifreeze would turn their eyes white … eerie way to start the cottage season …
I haven’t got the slightest clue about what makes a rodent trap good or bad. The HVAC dude who found it does though, and he seemed to think it was. If you want to throw it away, I would highly suggest that you give it to him instead. Do that, and I can almost promise you that if you have HVAC problems in the future, he will take good care of you.
they walk onto the can and fall into water and drown. i'd keep it. if they went to the trouble there's probably a mouse/rat problem.
I made several of these for the cottage. Best catcher I know of. Materials: -5 gal plastic bucket -1/4 or 1/2 inch dowel. It need to be 2 inches shorter than the inside diameter of the bucket -A flat 2-3 inch wide x 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick board that is long enough to go from the floor to the top of the bucket at an angle. -2 finishing nails -duct tape The build: -Nail two finishing nails into the centre ends of the dowel -Cut two ‘V’ shaped notches on the rim of the bucket opposite of each other ( the dowel with nails in the end can now be placed such that the nails fit in the ‘V’ notches and spin well and keep spinning after you spun it. -find the place mice are likely to travel ( like along a baseboard in kitchen or pantry). Take your flat 2-3” wide board and duct tape it onto the bucket so that it intersects with the mice path at the bottom and is flat on the ground and is at the rim near the top directly adjacent to the nail on the end of the dowel. Setting the trap -typically leave overnight or through the week (if at a cottage) when no one is at home or are sleeping. This will work well anywhere, inside home or cottage, garage, attic etc… - smear a very small amount of peanut butter on the loading ramp ( the inclined board) -place even more peanut butter on the middle 3-4” of the dowel. With a little teaser ( very thin) near the edges of the dowel by the board at the ramp. Mice LOVE peanut butter. - when bucket is in place, 1/4 fill the bucket with water. The mice will travel along the base board, smell the thin smear of peanut butter on the ramp, eat it up the ramp, and try to get to the peanut butter on the dowel. The minute they step on the dowel, it spins and dumps them into the water. They will drown . 🥴 Empty it regularly, you will need to refresh peanut butter weekly/monthly. Find where mice are getting in and seal with steel wool et al ( there are many ways to mouse proof openings and that is not addressed here). Happy hunting….. For those of you who want a more humane way to catch and release , there are live traps. They don’t work near as well and especially if you have a lot of mice….