We put Daisy and Tucker outside about a month ago when it got nice and warm all day and night.  Tucker loves it; Daisy is not a happy camper because this makes the lazy cat actually get up and move (in the house, her belly literally drug the ground when she walked because she just went from the food bowl to the litter box and back to the couch to sleep again so she was really fat!).

Unfortunately, putting the outside meant that while the cats are away, the mice will play – and by that, I mean they moved inside!  I don’t know how mice know when a cat isn’t in the house here, but they do.  We have no mice in here when the cats are inside, or else the cats catch and eat them all and leave no evidence of them, but when there isn’t a cat in our house, we get A LOT of field mice in here!  Since that’s not sanitary, and I can’t stand having them in the house, we either have to put the cats back inside or we have to buy mousetraps.

Ted was all for killing the mice.  He came home with the deadly ones, and I just couldn’t use them.  A few years back, I did use a trap like that, and it didn’t kill the mouse right away.  There was blood everywhere on my counter and wall.  It was traumatic (I’m not even kidding – TRAUMATIC!!!).  I cried and cried and cried while I cleaned that up and vowed to never use a trap like that again.  I even take the mice from my cats (when I see they have one) and make them drop it into a tall gallon “mouse jar” that I have that is just for the purpose of transporting live mice from the cats down the road and letting them loose.  My family thinks I’m nuts.

Anyway, I got on Amazon, and I looked up live mouse traps.  I wound up getting these Humane Mouse Traps by Kat Sense.  They are FANTASTIC!!!  The photo below shows the trap when a mouse is caught in it.  The peanut butter (or cheese or whatever you want to use as bait) is placed inside the trap on that square end, and the other flappy end stands up (like a little open door).  When the mouse goes inside the trap to the end with the bait, it rocks, which causes the little door to close.  That’s it!  There are air holes so the mouse can breathe, too!

I have caught one mouse every single night for the past ten nights.  We haven’t caught any (or seen any evidence of mice in the kitchen) for the past three nights.  Seriously, I cannot say enough good things about these mouse traps!  They are SUPER easy to use, and they’re SUPER easy to get the caught mice out of them without have to touch them.

I just open one end (both ends open) and give the trap a good shake, and the mouse drops out onto the ground and scurries away!