Archive through August 12, 2002
TV ClubHouse: Archives: THERE IS A MOUSE IN THE HOUSE!!!:
Archive through August 12, 2002
Corriecat | Thursday, August 01, 2002 - 06:32 pm     My Button used to bring me all sorts of presents. I had a big white Marcellas type bathrobe and one morning I put it on and felt something cold on my back. It was a poor lizard hanging on for dear life. The most disgusting thing they would catch was Palo Verde beetles and let them loose alive to chase around the house. (Think big as your hand, black, flying cockroach.) |
Nightcrawler | Friday, August 02, 2002 - 08:16 pm     that would not be fun at all to find in your house.I'm glade we don't have them in Iowa!! we had a cat that would go get birds and bring them in the house and let them go. then the bird would go crazy and the cat too trying to get it again. |
Whit4you | Friday, August 02, 2002 - 09:29 pm     LOL funny thread I have a mouse in my house too and haven't figured out what to do with it yet... last time I had one in my house I used decon and ended up with a dead stinky mouse - so don't wanna do that this time....not sure what to do yet |
Schoolmarm | Saturday, August 03, 2002 - 09:01 am     If you can find out how they are getting in...plug the hole with one of those stainless steel (like an SOS) pad. I had a TINY gap in the floor of my sliding DR door when I lived in Iowa and the little mousies were coming in there. Plugged the hole and no more mice! They hate to chew through the metal! Haven't seen a mouse since I moved out to PA, but I had a wild skunk on my porch this spring and I stepped on a HUGE snail/slug in my living room. Hope that one come in when I was doing my gardening! (By the way, my flowers are GORGEOUS this year!) Anyone have ideas on how to get rud of wild skunks? We don't have animal control here except with our local forest service and I think that they are busy cleaning up the dead deer roadkill and nabbing poachers. |
Enbwife | Saturday, August 03, 2002 - 09:45 am     Mice - urghh!!! We have a BAT in our house! It's in our basement where we were sleeping to get some relief from the heatwave, until one night when I woke up, flicked on the light and saw it flying around!!! We can't find it now so we don't know if it's gone or if it's hiding... Yuck!!! Needless to say, no more sleeping in the basement for us! |
Schoolmarm | Saturday, August 03, 2002 - 12:47 pm     Well, now the shock of THAT would be enough to put you into labor! The house across the street from me has a flood (flock, coven, drove....whatever DO you call a bunch of bats) of bats and they circle the house and chimney at night. Kind of creepy. I have no clue how to get rid of bats! |
Holly | Saturday, August 03, 2002 - 08:12 pm     NC I thought about you when I saw this site. LoL It takes a while to load and is long,but funny. Hope you enjoy.... http://www.stupidinternet.org/mouse.html |
Nightcrawler | Saturday, August 03, 2002 - 09:22 pm     Holly thank you I LOVED IT it was funny. we did not go that for but we did get the mice out of the house. we think? you all need to go see this site!!!!! |
Juju2bigdog | Saturday, August 03, 2002 - 11:06 pm     Holly, that was hilarious. |
Karuuna | Sunday, August 04, 2002 - 11:43 am     So yesterday I go out to feed the dogs. The giant bag of dog food is stored in the garage, inside a big garbage can. I use the big old scooper, get one scoop of food out, fill one dish. Get the other dish, get another big scoop, dump it into the second dish - and when I look down I see a terrified little field mouse on top of the dog food. I scoop him back out of the dish, walk way out in the field and let him go. I catch all the assorted bugs that get in my house and set them free whenever I can. If ants invade, I made a little trail of food to lead them back out the house. The exception is bees and wasps cause I'm truly deathly allergic. I figure killing them is self defense. And yesterday I found a spider the size of a tarantula in my office. Just sitting there looking at me. Okay, I panicked. Little spiders are no problem. A spider as big as my hand belongs in another country. He got the same treatment as those bees/wasps, cause I almost had a heart attack. That qualifies as self defense, doesn't it? My cat's pretty good about catching things. I have to race to beat him to catching the little critters I try to let go. He's pretty darn fast tho. |
Sia | Sunday, August 04, 2002 - 05:10 pm     Karuuna, you're so nice to have a "catch-and-release" program. I found an opossum on my back porch inside a 20-lb bag of dry cat food that had gotten moldy (was in the damp basement; bag was then moved to the back porch until trash-day) and finished him off with a hammer! My heart just about stopped after the first blow: who knew that a possum will HISS like a cat? I'd be mortified to harm a cat, so I peeked into the bag with a flashlight handy to make sure what my quarry was. Possums are open targets, however. We have to dispose of several raccoons and possums each year here to keep our dogs and cats healthy and well-fed. (We eliminate the coons and possums because they can be rabid and because they eat our pet food--we do NOT cook the wild game to feed our pets, which is what my last sentence might have made it sound like!)  |
Admin | Monday, August 05, 2002 - 09:29 pm     That spider the size of a hand sounds terrifying! My bat problem is embarrasing now! Back to the original topic. I had mice once in our old house. The tenants upstairs complained about hearing them in the ceiling of the bathroom with them scurrying into the living room and bedroom. I hired a pro to get rid of them. He simply placed some poison around the house; it didn't work. I decided to do it myself. I cut open the ceiling and put in tons of poison! About a year later the mice finally stopped! Then the tenants complained of these small flying bugs. There were dozens of them around the windows. I took a sample down the pest control lab and they said they were 'Warehouse beetles' which live in grain. Turns out the mouse poison has small pieces of grain in it to attract the mice, and this grain was contaminated with larvae of these beetles and they had hatched! I cut open the bathroom ceiling to find the poison from a year ago (I had since patched and painted the ceiling) and I found a pile of bug larvae about the size of a large beach ball!! There were millions of them! I had to remove all the insulation from the ceiling. I filled a few garbage bags with larvae, larvae carcasses and insulation! I sprayed inside the ceiling with poison...what a nightmare! I never did cut open the living room or bedroom ceilings....but they eventually all died. I was told they had a lifespan. Then last year I found an unused box of the poison in the basement when we moved. It was completely wrapped in the original plastic, and there, under the plastic I could see larvae crawling around...apparently they had been living off the grain in there for a couple of years, completely sealed in plastic! Nightmare.... |
Wargod | Monday, August 05, 2002 - 09:34 pm     Thanks.....Here go the nightmares again, LOL! Spiders here, mice there, bats here, larvae over there......eeeeeeeek! |
Ddr1135 | Tuesday, August 06, 2002 - 03:10 am     Inside my dog and two cats take care of anything that moves! The cats are particulary fond of the large tree roaches that occasionally get in. They turn into growling, snarling monsters protecting their prey. LOL But I do have a problem...I live in a downtown area in a two story building that I renovated (think general store w/apartment on top). We have a cat overload in our neighborhood and I was tending to 3 kittens who had come to live at my house. One night about 9:00 pm, I was sitting outside on the first level porch tending to the kittens, when a possum comes out of the drainage hole between my neighbor and me. I almost fainted!!!! He traveled along the neighbor's building and went underneath my outdoor building. Next morning at 5:00 am (I was tending to kittens again), here comes the possum to go back into the hole. I've seen him a few times since then. Yuck. I have no idea how to get rid of it. Any suggestions? |
Sia | Thursday, August 08, 2002 - 09:56 am     Admin, with your poison-resistant beetles you have the beginnings of a screenplay for a freaky horror movie! If you're too busy to do the actual writing, Roddy the Wonder-Boy might be willing to provide his "considerable" skills as a ghost-writer. Watch out for him, though; he might try to vote you out before the deal is completely consummated. If he tells you that he's "got your back," run from Roddy! Ddr, possums don't become agressive and attack; they basically back away and look for an opportunity to run from you. They're not smart animals. If you back a possum into a corner, it will hiss and scare you to death, but you can pretty easily incapacitate it. I've found you can stun a possum, dump it into a wastebasket and take it for a drive in the country for release. To kill the animal, I personally recommend a hammer, a shovel, or even a broom-handle (once)! You want something long enough that will keep you at a distance. The easiest method I've employed is my current possum-eradication program: husband with a rifle. He's a good marksman and dispatches the animal as humanely as possible. |
Admin | Thursday, August 08, 2002 - 11:20 am     My Dad came for a visit today. He was at his cottage the other day (it's more like a large shack in the woods) and he found a mouse nest in the kitchen drawer. It was full of baby mice that didn't make noises or anything, just born. He put the nest outside hoping the mother would take them away. After a day she did not, so he put it back in the drawer. The next day they were all gone! That was his chance to kill them, but it didn't seem right to him. Part of the fun is in the chase...he prefers to wait until they are adults, then he'll hunt 'em down!  |
Bob2112 | Thursday, August 08, 2002 - 11:42 am     <...makes mental note to be nicer to Sia and rifle toting husband and to dispose of possum costume...> |
Julieboo | Thursday, August 08, 2002 - 12:33 pm     Sia, yuck. Can't you just keep the pet food in your house or somewhere that the possoms, and raccons can't get it? Do you really kill with hammers, etc? (jb runs for her life...) (I like raccoons and possoms.) |
Sia | Thursday, August 08, 2002 - 03:05 pm     Julieboo, that was a one-time thing with the bag of cat food. It had drawn moisture in the basement and was moldy. When I found it I put it on the back porch until trash-day when it would have been taken to the curb for pick-up. The night before trash-day a possum got into the bag to eat the moldy cat food and, yes, I did kill that possum with a hammer. I have killed at least one possum and several snakes with a shovel. I killed another possum with a broom-handle. When I was single, I tried to remove possums to neutral ground, only to be overrun with them again. My cats are more important to me than the wild opossums, so I have to protect my pets from the threat of rabies, distemper or other pest-borne diseases. As a boy, my husband raccoon-hunted all night with his grandfather (like the boy in "Where the Red Fern Grows," and I grew up in a family with guns, too. My brother shoots deer for the venison and I don't have a problem with people shooting animals to kill for the food. Killing for sport I don't support or understand. I do feel that I have to keep the area around my home free of wild animals that could transmit illness to my children or my domesticated animals. West Nile Virus has been found within an hour or two of where I live, so I think animal control is an important issue. Julie, did you know that a grown adult male raccoon is a ferocious, ruthless, violent animal? Raccoons have killed dozens of my grandmother's beloved hens, turkeys, roosters, and ducks and geese. My poor grandmother cried really hard the morning she found two young turkeys killed by a @#$%^ raccoon. One had been torn into pieces, pulled section by section through the chicken-wire on its coop, and the second one was still alive, all the flesh stripped from its thigh. This makes me hate raccoons. I can't help it. Raccoons can and do attack dogs and cats, too, with disastrous adults. An adult male raccoon could seriously harm a person, as well. If I had the patience and was in good health, I'd stake out my grandmother's hen-house the way my brother-in-law does and try to take care of the raccoons at her farm. Raccoons are bloodthirsty, cruel, heartless, persistent, scheming varmints who have no place on a farm where poultry is raised. The raccoons just have to go. I am not a violent person. Actually, I'm quite nice. I have friends and a loving family, and I'm just perhaps a bit braver than some of the women I know who won't take on a wild animal alone. As with checking my oil, mowing my yard, and electrical wiring projects, pest-control is one duty I've gladly handed over to my rifle-toting husband! Have no fears, Bob and Julieboo; Sia is gentle and kind and very loving--to people, children, cats, dogs, horses, cows, sheep, most domesticated animals--even mice.  |
Bob2112 | Thursday, August 08, 2002 - 03:17 pm     ... and Sponges?  |
Sia | Thursday, August 08, 2002 - 07:01 pm     Sure, Bob, I love sponges! I don't have any in my aquarium, but I do have lots of platys and tetras and a few odds and ends. Are sponges hard to raise? |
Juju2bigdog | Thursday, August 08, 2002 - 11:17 pm     Sia, Sponges seem to be very adaptable. |
Dahli | Monday, August 12, 2002 - 03:09 pm     We used to keep snakes as pets, in particular a large boa constrictor Fernando that 'hung out' on the curtain rods. Anyway this is one of the best ways to control mice and other assorted vermin (unfortunately we lost our hamsters to him as well) Plus as a bonus snakes are quiet, well behaved,only shed once or twice a year and like to curl up with you and watch tv. |
Ratlady | Monday, August 12, 2002 - 06:45 pm     I just found this board and of course, this was the first thread I had to read. I have to say, you guys are so funny! Mice don't scare me one bit. We have to feed them to our snakes. My mother in law has mice in her house (they came from her next door neighbor). I'm still trying to talk her and everyone that live there to catch some for me and my husband so we don't have to go to the pet store and buy them! LOL I know, alot of you are probably thinking "EWWWWWWW" LOL. I also have 17 rats as pets. They will NEVER meet my snakes. They are the sweetest little critters in the world. It's amazing how smart they are too. I must say, they are probably my favorite pets I have (I have a total of 27 pets). |
Bookworm | Monday, August 12, 2002 - 07:25 pm     <Bookworm faints.> BTW welcome to the board anyway Ratlady. We probably have about that many pets but they are cats and dogs. |
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