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This week in Thorne


LadyG

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34 minutes ago, LadyG said:

Nothing to report as tied up next to Thorne Boat Services, to get cat flap and other things installed.

 Bought a moustrap at pet shop as I suspect I have a stowaway.

Is it a humane trap, the curved one that rocks. I put a dob of peanut butter in mine and it caught the mouse during the night. I let it go in the field.

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19 hours ago, bizzard said:

Is it a humane trap, the curved one that rocks. I put a dob of peanut butter in mine and it caught the mouse during the night. I let it go in the field.

It's a Nipper, but no sign of any livestock , so far......

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On 08/07/2020 at 21:39, LadyG said:

Nothing to report as tied up next to Thorne Boat Services, to get cat flap and other things installed.

 Bought a moustrap at pet shop as I suspect I have a stowaway.

i’d sack your cat and get a proper one :D 

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Surely a humane trap is more appropriate?  Why do you feel you need to kill the mouse or rat (other rodents are available on request)?  I apologise if this seems a little harsh but I can’t think of a more pleasant way of expressing my point  or have I missed something why a nipper is actually better?

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On 12/07/2020 at 15:19, Dartagnan said:

Surely a humane trap is more appropriate?  Why do you feel you need to kill the mouse or rat (other rodents are available on request)?  I apologise if this seems a little harsh but I can’t think of a more pleasant way of expressing my point  or have I missed something why a nipper is actually better?

I tried a humane one, it did not work, but neither has the Nipper, I'm a bit mystified, maybe it has gone ashore, I saw it a few times but not recently.

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11 minutes ago, LadyG said:

I tried a humane one, it did not work, but neither has the Nipper, I'm a bit mystified, maybe it has gone ashore, I saw it a few times but not recently.

They come out at night when it's all quiet looking for grub. when it goes into it you will hear the trap rocking on the floor. Peanut butter is the ideal bait, a dob of it at the back of the trap so the mouse goes right in.

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15 minutes ago, bizzard said:

They come out at night when it's all quiet looking for grub. when it goes into it you will hear the trap rocking on the floor. Peanut butter is the ideal bait, a dob of it at the back of the trap so the mouse goes right in.

Poor mouse might have a nut allergy ??

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11 hours ago, LadyG said:

I tried a humane one, it did not work, but neither has the Nipper, I'm a bit mystified, maybe it has gone ashore, I saw it a few times but not recently.

 

Maybe the cat has been shamed into doing it's duty? ????

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I catch an average of 2 mice a day in the several traps set in the house and garden.  It was rather more when I had the plant nursery, so I calculate that I have caught upwards of 20,000 mice in the past 30 years.

  Recently for some reason an increasing number have still been alive when I found them in my morning inspection, usually caught by a leg, and I've had to kill them.  This was rather unpleasant, so I bought some 'humane' traps.  None of them has caught a single mouse, so I have reluctantly continued with the Nippers.

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On 12/07/2020 at 15:19, Dartagnan said:

Surely a humane trap is more appropriate?  Why do you feel you need to kill the mouse or rat (other rodents are available on request)?  I apologise if this seems a little harsh but I can’t think of a more pleasant way of expressing my point  or have I missed something why a nipper is actually better?

Yes: dead ones don't come back.

That said, when we had mice in a previous cottage I bought a humane mouse trap from the pleasingly-named "Hamelin House". It caught several mice. I used to take the trap down to school and release the mice which would scamper away, much to the delight of the children who were waiting to go into school.

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7 minutes ago, Jerra said:

Over the years I have tried various humane traps and like you never caught a single mouse.

The Hamelin House brand seems to be no longer in production, but it was roughly like the one illustrated except that it had a squarer section. The mouse, lured by food, went into the end of it, upon which the door closed behind it and needed the operator to reopen it.

humane mousetrap.jpg

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25 minutes ago, Naughty Cal said:

I have a small dog who is very competent at catching rabbits and rats. I'm sure he could turn his hand to mice.

 

You can hire him by the hour. Price to be agreed.

I see that he can now bring an identical co-worker along for those really tough jobs.

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3 hours ago, Mac of Cygnet said:

I catch an average of 2 mice a day in the several traps set in the house and garden.  It was rather more when I had the plant nursery, so I calculate that I have caught upwards of 20,000 mice in the past 30 years.

  Recently for some reason an increasing number have still been alive when I found them in my morning inspection, usually caught by a leg, and I've had to kill them.  This was rather unpleasant, so I bought some 'humane' traps.  None of them has caught a single mouse, so I have reluctantly continued with the Nippers.

 My late cat brought hundreds of mice onto the boat, or the same one hundreds of times. I found that a humane trap baited with chocolate worked very quickly. The rabbits and rats were always dead I’m glad to say, and birds were seldom brought in, and those that were were often let go when she got halfway through the cat flap and opened her mouth to say hello to me. I got expert at opening the front doors and shooing them out.

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  • 1 month later...

More than 20 years ago we must have picked up a field mouse when we moored against a rather overgrown towpath with overhanging vegetation, where we had had to cut away the grass and weeds to get on and off. The first sign was granules of expanded polystyrene on the dinette table where the rodent had evidently started to carve itself a home in the insulation, followed by evidence in the form of a nibbled pack of instant mash, and droppings. I phoned the boatyard to say we had a stowaway and they arranged for us to call at a boatyard on our route to pick up a "little nipper"- type mousetrap.  In the event, before we got there I managed to dispatch it with a tin of baked beans when I found it in the larder. It must have been alone as we had no futher problem. The boatyard said it was the first time they had heard of this happening. Our junior school-age kids weren't bothered: they knew how destructive mice can be, and cheddar cheese in a Little Nipper works every time. 

Edited by Ronaldo47
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Had a mouse commit suicide once, i was at outside a barn on a step enjoying the view of lake windermere and the poor sod dropped to the floor in front of me with a fair crack, poor sod wasn't dead but very damaged, so had to finish it off.

 

I suspect it was dropped by a bird of some sort.

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We used to "palletise" our stuff for canal holidays using the cardboard fruit and vegetable trays you can get from supermarkets, which stack well. Trays of food could usually simply be slid into cupboards with minimal unpacking. The mouse was in a half-empty tray, so its escape routes were limited! 

 

Although we are in a built-up area, our road at home runs between a deep, heavily wooded, railway cutting on one side and school playing fields on the other side, so our shed and garage tend to get regular visits by field mice and the occasional rat: the garden gets visited by  the occasional fox and badger.  My oddest rodent experience was a young rat, stone dead, several inches from a sprung mouse trap, and with no obvious sgn of injury. I wondered if it had set off the trap and died of shock? 

 

I am afraid I am not sentimental about rodents: quite apart from the hygene issue, one of the things they like to chew is electricity cables, so definitely not things you want on board: I wonder if they are attracted to the sweet taste of the plastic insulation? I understand that lead-based pigments still have to be used for colouring plastic cable insulation to ensure flexibilty, and lead compounds are usually sweet to the taste. 

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2 hours ago, Ronaldo47 said:

My oddest rodent experience was a young rat, stone dead, several inches from a sprung mouse trap, and with no obvious sgn of injury. I wondered if it had set off the trap and died of shock? 

 

I've had this happen several times with mice over the course of my long mousetrapping career.  Also the complete disappearance of mousetraps, only sometimes eventually found complete with skeletal remains.  But one experience that unfortunately keeps coming back to mind when I'm cooking is turning on the grill and hearing a scrabbling noise before a half-grilled mouse came staggering out. ?

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On 17/08/2020 at 21:23, Ronaldo47 said:

pack of instant mash, and droppings.

That must have been from the supermarket's Value Range. The costlier options have bits of real bacon in amongst the mash.

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