Think Like A Mouse

Ready to Rid Your Healthy Home of Those Pesky Rodents Before the Holiday Guests Arrive? Take ‘Paws’ and Go Exploring With Fresh Eyes, A Wee Nose, and Whiskers

Oh, rats!?! They’re no joke.

In autumn, as temperatures drop and the rain saturates the leaf cover, rats, mice and squirrels begin to look for warm, dry places to nest. In western North Carolina, that often means we’re staving off rodents in our attics, kitchen cabinets, or other interior wall spaces.

A couple of weeks ago, our neighbors over in Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham made Orkin’s list of the 50 most rat-infested cities in America. Charlotte ranked 22th, and Raleigh-Durham ranked 27th. Of course, the evidence was limited to one company’s service records, but let’s suffice it to say that exterminators were in high demand.

Scientists on the eastern seaboard speculate that warming winters have extended the reproduction cycles of rats and mice. A news outlet in Portland, Ore., did the math. One pregnant mama rat x 12 babies which begin to reproduce at 2 months of age.  A single pair of rat parents can have as many as 15,000 descendants.

Think about that for a minute. 15,000 sets of little scurrying feet scuttling about your house.

Now think about the holidays, and all the food prep and storage sure to take place. Logically, ignoring the mouse in the kitchen or the rat nibbling leftover grain in the backyard chicken coop is a big healthiness fail that can affect your healthiness and those of your friends, family and neighbors.

Rats and mice aren’t the healthiest critters around. In the dark days of the middle ages, they spread disease and scourges from one town to the next. They contaminate grains and food storage. And they’ll gnaw their way through everything from cardboard boxes to electrical wiring.

Recently, a colleague found that a mouse had nested in her stove. It had to be taken apart and cleaned and all the insulation had to be replaced. What a nasty mess!

To rid your home of unwanted holiday pests such as rats and mice, do-it-yourselfers have several choices at most local hardware stores:

• Old-fashioned rat traps or single capture live traps (indoor use)
• Wire traps (for outdoor capture and release)
• Rat poisons (which contain neurotoxins, so follow the instructions precisely)

Morbid choices like these can tear at our sense of compassion and fair play.

Rather than this last-resort methodology, why not focus on the more humane beginnings of the issue? Focus on critter behavior, the nature of the beast, or as I put it, “think like a mouse.”

Think Like a Mouse

One of my jobs as a mouse is to explore. Are there holes in this house big enough for me to scurry through to get inside? Easier yet, are these holes right at soil level and behind piles of leaves and mulch that I feel much safer tunneling through? I’ll follow the scent trail of other mice that have gone in and out of these holes.

I’ll follow my nose deeper into the house toward the scent of spilled cat kibble and dog food, people food crumbs and spilled bird seed. I’ll find these in the garage, in the kitchen, in the pantry, and near the birdcage. Who needs to stay outside and eat acorns when here are all of these wonderfully tasty treats!

Oh, and how I love it when I don’t even have to go all the way back outside just to get a drink of water. I’ve explored the house well enough and know that I can get a sip of water at the drip under the bathroom sink, or at the water puddle in the corner of the crawl space, or even off the condensation on the un-insulated inch of air conditioner refrigerant line in the attic.

You get the idea. You’re making this way too easy for the mice.

Continue along through this line of thinking. You’ll find a long list of do-able adjustments you can make at your house to make it less inviting to these little critters who love to explore, eat, hide, nest, stay warm, stay dry, escape from predators, make tunnels and trails, and chew,chew, chew!

Make the perimeter of your house a bit more stark and less like a tangled, mouse-friendly forest. Seal closed those easy pathways into your house. Don’t leave mouse-rewarding food bits that have fallen down under and behind things and giving motivation for the mice to move in rather than go back to the forest where they’re supposed to be.

They’ll live out happier lives outside rather than become dead inside your house because you poisoned or snared them.

Not sure where to start? We can help.