The Endless Quest For a Better Mousetrap (newyorker.com) 87
Inventors have been refining them for centuries. What are they trying to achieve? From a report: Today, there are only a few kinds of mousetraps available at a typical hardware store: snap traps, glue traps, electric traps, bucket traps, and live-capture traps. And yet, inventors have filed more than forty-five hundred U.S. patents for animal traps, about a thousand of which are specifically related to mice. (Many inventors don't specify the intended targets of their traps.) Presumably, some mousetrap inventors have been spurred on by a quote widely attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door." Emerson probably never said exactly this; what he did write down, in a journal, was that the world would beat a path to the door of anyone who sold better corn, wood, boards, pigs, chairs, knives, crucibles, or church organs. There's nothing uniquely profitable about mousetraps. Still, people keep inventing them, probably because mice are such a widespread nuisance.
Some inventors come up with mousetraps because of firsthand rodent experiences. One company well known for traps that can hold multiple mice at once, for instance, was founded by a janitor at an Iowa high school who noticed that mice were eating the students' lunches. But, just as there are too many mice, there are too many mousetraps. In a 2011 paper, Dagg, the schoolteacher, found that only four per cent of the mousetraps patented in the United States have been commercially produced -- and many designs are never even patented. The Trap History Museum, outside Columbus, Ohio, houses what is very likely the world's largest collection of mousetraps. Many of the designs on view there would be prohibitively expensive to mass-produce, given their unwieldy size or reliance on wacky technologies. Others barely work, having apparently been designed to function on only the rarest of occasions. Some designs are dreamy and imaginative; like contemporary art, they are valued for those qualities, not because they make it easier to keep a mouse-free home. You wouldn't pee in a toilet mounted on a gallery wall. Likewise, you wouldn't get much use out of a trap, patented in 1908, that affixes a jangly collar to a mouse so that it will annoy other mice until they flee their compatriot for the great outdoors.
Some inventors come up with mousetraps because of firsthand rodent experiences. One company well known for traps that can hold multiple mice at once, for instance, was founded by a janitor at an Iowa high school who noticed that mice were eating the students' lunches. But, just as there are too many mice, there are too many mousetraps. In a 2011 paper, Dagg, the schoolteacher, found that only four per cent of the mousetraps patented in the United States have been commercially produced -- and many designs are never even patented. The Trap History Museum, outside Columbus, Ohio, houses what is very likely the world's largest collection of mousetraps. Many of the designs on view there would be prohibitively expensive to mass-produce, given their unwieldy size or reliance on wacky technologies. Others barely work, having apparently been designed to function on only the rarest of occasions. Some designs are dreamy and imaginative; like contemporary art, they are valued for those qualities, not because they make it easier to keep a mouse-free home. You wouldn't pee in a toilet mounted on a gallery wall. Likewise, you wouldn't get much use out of a trap, patented in 1908, that affixes a jangly collar to a mouse so that it will annoy other mice until they flee their compatriot for the great outdoors.
Has anyone asked Shawn Woods? (Score:4, Insightful)
He has only been checking mousetraps out for a few years on YouTube. I would have thought we found the best mouse trap by now and I think he said it was the Flip n Slide.
Cats (Score:3)
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My current cat is older and missing many teeth, so kills are slow and torturous.
For the cat, or for the mouse?
Re:Cats (Score:5, Funny)
My current cat is older and missing many teeth, so kills are slow and torturous.
For the cat, or for the mouse?
Pretty sure the cats still enjoys it.
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It's not exactly illegal to get another cat before the elderly cat hits his/her expiration date.
Though I admit that I'm not going to replace my current cats. They're probably good for another 15-20 years, but I doubt seriously that *I* am good for another 15-20 years. And I don't want to leave orphan cats & dogs behind...
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I've considered bringing a kitten home to see how she reacts, but it would be highly inconvenient if it does not go well.
Many shelters will allow you to bring your current dog/cat to see if it gets along with a prospective additional animal.
Even if that is not possible, it is a bad idea to "bring home" a new animal. Instead, it is better to introduce your old and new pets in a neutral place, such as a park, so they can sniff and play together for a while before going home. This reduces the chance of triggering the territorial instinct.
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Mink or Ferret are much better mousers.
Gene drive (Score:2)
There is a segregation distorter (I think it is called that) that makes all the mouse offspring males who carry the same gene. This causes mice to locally go extinct. It would make an intersting way to control mice.
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Huh... that's not too different from what I "invented" to get rid of a vole once. It kept escaping the commercial live traps, and I didn't want to use a lethal trap. So I set up a large vase and built a ramp to the top; on the top, the bait was hanging from the bottom of some strips of paper plate that would give way when the vole stood on it. And it totally worked. :) I heard immediately when it went off, I'm glad I did, because it was already trying to prop up the pieces of the paper plate (which fell
see cat vs mouse (Score:2)
That's because we're done (Score:5, Informative)
There are only four kinds of mouse trap worth using. Classic snap trap, cheap and good. No-kill box trap, cheap and good enough if your goal is for some reason to not kill the vermin, like you want to throw them into your neighbor's yard I guess. Bucket flip lid trap, effective for high volumes. And the electric trap, which is the best for everyone else.
Every other kind of trap is overwrought and/or requires too much cleaning.
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Sticky traps will kill the mouse eventually, probably from heart failure.
Assuming they don't chew the limb off that's stuck in it.
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But what are you going to do with them, release them outside so they can come back inside? Animal control doesn't want them, I'm not having them in my house, and I'm not going to relocate them someplace else for them to be a problem for someone else, or more likely just wasted effort because they're a quick meal for something else. I don't want to be in contact with them for that long, for obvious reasons.
I'm not bothering to live trap anything the size of a mouse.
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Well, if you live in an area where mice are
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There are multiple reasons for using live traps, one of them is that not every species you encounter indoors is a pest.
I think if the mouse is in your house and it isn't a pet then it is most definitely a pest.
There are native species of rodent that you really shouldn't be arbitrarily eradicating if you can help it.
At the rate mice reproduce it is rather difficult to eradicate them (not impossible but not easy either). I would hazard to guess that if you are only trapping mice inside your house the likelihood of eradicating the species is almost nill.
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Plank to a scented rolling rod over a bucket (Score:2)
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I tried that and they didn't like it. The flip lid trap is better because it is sturdy until they overbalance.
Because Rodents are still a problem. (Score:2)
I got a new car in May. by June, I started hearing rattling in the back, I invested it, and it was mouse droppings. So I cleaned up the droppings and setup a mouse trap in my cars back seat. So far I only caught one, and it might had only been one, but we are never sure.
A farm with food, may attract hundreds or thousands of mice, so a different type of trap is needed. If you own an apartment complex then you need a different approach.
There are going to be new mousetraps designs well into the future, unle
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I got a new car in May. by June, I started hearing rattling in the back, I invested it, and it was mouse droppings. So I cleaned up the droppings and setup a mouse trap in my cars back seat. So far I only caught one, and it might had only been one, but we are never sure.
Rodents can easily write off a car. My late father's car was written off by squirrels. Chewed clean through wiring harnesses as thick as my thumb, copper and all.
You wouldn't pee in a toilet mounted on a gallery (Score:3)
"You wouldn't pee in a toilet mounted on a gallery wall."
YoU wOuLdnT DowNLoAd a CaR
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"You wouldn't pee in a toilet mounted on a gallery wall."
Oh I wouldn't, wouldn't I? I know convenience when I see it.
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I think he carries some jugs of water with him always now.
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"You wouldn't pee in a toilet mounted on a gallery wall."
...unless, of course, you wanted "to go where no man had gone before".
Poison works better (Score:2)
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You mean the kind where they're poisoned after being trapped in a box, right? Because I don't trust people with rodent poison in general, most people don't give two shits about consequences of their actions apparently.
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You mean the kind where they're poisoned after being trapped in a box, right?
You could do that I suppose, but it defeats the purpose.
Because I don't trust people with rodent poison in general
Some people can't be trusted with cars, guns, or anything else. What we need are idiot traps.
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What we need are idiot traps.
We have 'em, but we don't exterminate people in them. Instead, they are radicalized. Anyhoo, people are already killing off the animals that prey on rodents by poisoning rodents indiscriminately. It's not a winning strategy.
Re: Poison works better (Score:2)
We have them, but they become overcrowded, some are released to do real damage, and end up right back in.
And city politicians are becoming more lenient on more and more serious crimes.
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But it has to be the stuff that kills them in one feeding and desicates their bodies so they don't smell.
Never heard of such stuff. Bad idea anyway because they still attract flies, and do you really want dead mouse bodies in hiding places all over the house? Because the poisoned mice crawl to a hiding place before they die. Found lots like that in a house I moved into.
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and do you really want dead mouse bodies in hiding places all over the house? Because the poisoned mice crawl to a hiding place before they die. Found lots like that in a house I moved into.
My house is 125 years old. I'm sure there are many mouse skeletons hidden within.
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A classic This American Life (Score:2)
One trap works for me (Score:4, Informative)
A decade ago, I bought a house that had mice that got in via our stove's gas line. I went to Ace Hardware to buy some classic wooden & metal traps, but the clerk told me the one I needed to get was this JAWZ model [acehardware.com]. We bought four of them and set them up w/ peanut butter as bait. That night, we killed four mice, and another five over the next week.
That set of traps killed over 20 mice in our house over the course of the year. Every trap was an instant-kill...snapped the varmint's neck clean, every time. Cheap and simple.
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Snapped the vermin's neck?
Those things pulverise the head, neck and part of the back and stick some knobbles through the brain. They look pretty medieval. On the other hand I think they are very quick.
They are also quite powerful. I had one go boing and project itself so far I couldn't see it. When checking the traps, my brain was looking or full traps, not missing ones. Eventually my nose caught it.
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The early bird gets the worm, but the seconds mouse gets the cheese. *ba dum dump*
I'll see myself out...
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Blah! Not only do those traps sound dangerous, it's easy to imagine how 'fun' cleaning them would be.
Live catch traps only for me. No ooky corpse to eliminate, let the little bugger run loose, and the eagles and hawks will be pleased to find fresh snacks in the meadow.
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Blah! Not only do those traps sound dangerous, it's easy to imagine how 'fun' cleaning them would be.
They're not dangerous to humans. I possibly exaggerated a bit, but the mouse head looks pretty flattened, not just a snapped neck. They don't actually break the skin, so you just open it and the mouse falls out.
Live catch traps only for me. No ooky corpse to eliminate, let the little bugger run loose, and the eagles and hawks will be pleased to find fresh snacks in the meadow.
Problem or me is I leave the tra
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Another vote for Jawz!
I put 12 of them in a circle around a pile of birdseed
Re: One trap works for me (Score:2)
I agree, no need to bait. Just set the trap with the deadly side against the wall, that's where the mice travel. I don't see what's wrong with the classic mouse trap seems to work quite well.
Get a cat (Score:3)
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Indoor cats are less likely to have vet incidentals and are far more likely to live longer. The above generalization would only be true if you didn't provide your cat with enough indoor stimulation in the form of toys, surfaces that they can are perfectly free to climb and scratch, etc.
All of our cats are strictly indoors. The one time that we had mice to deal with, it turned out that at least one of our cats was actually a pretty darn good mouser.
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A cat's nature is to kill potentially hundreds of songbirds and small animals over its lifespan too. Not a fan of outdoor cats for that reason.
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Songbirds are noisy. Fuck 'em. Go cats!
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They don't last long outside as the Coyotes have expanded their habitat to most N. American cities and like a cat dinner.
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> Cats forced to live inside become too brain damaged
Oh shit, does this apply to humans also?
Best Trap: A bucket filled with motor coolant. (Score:2)
Water + Anti-Freeze = Coolant - the greenish one with glycol
I have had so many dead mice in that bucket when I drained my old timer and left the bucket in the garage it is just the best mouse trap at all.
glycol = sweet, but deadly
Not a problem until it is.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've had my share of issues with rodents sharing my accommodation.
A house I was renting some years back, had a single rat problem that gave me nightmares and ended up with a young healthy rat thrashing in a back breaker, until I dispatched it with a smash of a hammer. It was fucking awful.
That rat had plagued me for weeks, ate my soap, my potatoes, shat on my bedside table whilst I slept, ate my tobacco - not joking, this was years back.
The resident cat was afraid of it.
I felt awful both whilst knowing the rat was like a foot from me whist I slept and that I put it to a god awful end.
Some years later, "Malcolm" the mouse, that me and my other half named, made us both understand just how much piss and mess a mouse can cause in a kitchen.
The great irony being, it was absolutely dragged into the house by our cat.
We tried everything - because clearly, our cat had befriended "Malcolm" and wasn't about to kill him.
Every single "humane"? trap - all failed.
The only thing that worked? - the awful back-breaker.
After weeks of having to clean out the cupboards every day of mouse piss and shit, the back-breaker worked - "Malcolm" met his end.
Mice are easy to deal with, rats aren't.
Bottom line - the backbreaker trap is the only one that actually works. That nasty old spring laden thing that jokes are made of.
Not all are created equal - it requires a serious spring loaded tension that breaks bodies.
It's horrible... but so is an infestation of mice or rats.
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Every single "humane"? trap - all failed.
The only thing that worked? - the awful back-breaker.
After weeks of having to clean out the cupboards every day of mouse piss and shit, the back-breaker worked - "Malcolm" met his end.
Mice are easy to deal with, rats aren't.
Bottom line - the backbreaker trap is the only one that actually works. That nasty old spring laden thing that jokes are made of.
Not all are created equal - it requires a serious spring loaded tension that breaks bodies.
It's horrible... but so is an infestation of mice or rats.
The spring loaded snap trap is quite humane, quick kill
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Rats learn to not take the bait after you catch a few, then, if as recommended, they are against a wall, they get a leg caught. No fun to deal with a huge pissed off rat with its leg badly injured and body in the gap between the cupboards.
Re: Not a problem until it is.. (Score:2)
Never had any of the problems you've describe and I have dispatched quite a few rodent with classic traps.
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Most of the time. When I lived in a house which had mice, I killed three or four with a snap trap and then the next one was caught by the jaw but still alive, so I had to kill it. After that I switched to live traps and leaving them in a park for less squeamish predators.
Re: Not a problem until it is.. (Score:2)
Agreed, we don't need a better mouse trap.
House mice (Score:5, Interesting)
Traps only mean you will be dealing with dead animals forever. Traps do not guarantee they won't do serious damage (electrical?) before caught. Poison means they might die in a place where they are inaccessible except via very expensive means. I had one die in my car and I had to gut the car's interior, driving it around for months with just a driver's seat, before finding the it had died in a welded channel that took a 3-foot long grabber tool to retrieve (through a small hole using a mirror), and then it still smelled until I cleaned the channel twice with bleach on a sponge with that grabber tool. Awful.
And be careful about what you read, I believe a dead mouse can smell for years (another long story).
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Indeed, find and block the holes, including the ones that look too small. I swear, mice turn sideways into the 4th, 5th and 6th dimensions becoming point particles in the physical world, to go through the tiniest hole. Find those holes!
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Breaking news! (Score:2)
Classic engineering tradeoffs (Score:2)
For every problem, there are myriads of potential solutions, and the choices made by engineers depend on the specific criteria they want to focus on. Each "feature" has a cost and a benefit, which have to be weighed according to the priorities of the user.
For mouse traps, the classic snap trap is quick, cheap, simple, and painless for the mouse. But some people are squeamish about killing any kind of animal for any reason, and those people would prioritize traps that don't harm the creature.
Glue traps aren'
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I use a live catch trap, a metal box with weighted flaps in the entrances that most mice can't figure out how to escape through. One nice thing about this trap is that one mouse can be stuck inside, enjoying bananas and peanut butter, while its old buddy still outside comes along, and it's basically an invitation to join the party. One morning I found three mice in the box. One captured mouse seems to attract more.
Quite the opposite of glue traps and other types I've heard of, where one unfortunate squeak
Obviously, machine learning! (Score:2)
I can't believe the engineers have still not figure out that the best solution to design a mousetrap is to use machine learning. Clearly I'm no expert; but ask our machine learning friend they'll tell you how to do it!
Live near some barn owls (Score:4, Informative)
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I could use an owl door in my roof!
FWIW the "little nipper" is still best (Score:2)
We live in the country, so we get mice coming in in the winter. It ain't possible to block up the holes in an old house like ours. I've tried several modern traps. There's an excellent "humane" trap (leave them in there too long and they die of dehydration) except they eat the plastic trigger.
The most reliable is the "little nipper", as shown in countless Tom and Jerry cartoons; it's also the cheapest, It provides a quick death, if you're sensitive to such things.
At one stage, I thought our mice had evo
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Once the mice realize what the traps are, it becomes more about outsmarting them than anything else. They figure out very quickly how to clean off the trigger mechanism without dying, or they just simply avoid the trap. The best trick I've found was to use two traps in quick succession. Mouse jumps the first trap
Yawn (Score:2)
Well, I'm inventing a better mouse, (Score:1)
so there!