Well, these super mice would lick the peanut butter, cheese, etc. clean most nights and never get caught. Jared then went and bought those sticky traps-these also seemed to feed the mice every night and only catch paw prints. We were getting pretty discouraged and the furthest we got was injuring two mice, as the traps would be sprung with blood sprayed around them, but still no mice. I was sanitizing my counter night and morning because I didn't want them to find any scraps of food at night, and because I was completely grossed out at the thought of them running all over my kitchen! They were consistently leaving urine and about 6 droppings most nights. I don't even want to tell you what they did when we were out of town for labor day! Yuck! Let's just say they made themselves at home...
At this point we called the landlord and told her the dilemma. She said that the neighboring unit had an issue recently and that our house would qualify under the warranty so she would send the exterminator over. The first day he came, he looked at the droppings I had put in the trash and told me "That's your problem, Lady...You don't have mice, you have Rats!" I was totally disgusted even after he tried to reassure me by saying "That's good news because then you probably only have 1 or 2 rats rather than a family of mice with all those droppings." Good News! Was he kidding?
The main issue was that we had trained the rats to be "trap shy" by feeding them and injuring them so then we couldn't do anything. I mean I had to let them take run over my kitchen for a week and we are finally now getting to the point where we are allowed to put out traps again disguised under a pile of shredded newspaper and see where it takes us. So just to warn everyone, if you have "mouse" droppings you may want to double check that they are REALLY mouse droppings, and if you are trying to catch a rat, get a RAT trap. See picture-You will notice the traditional mouse trap alongside a rat trap. I found it a little comical. It is basically just a mouse trap on steroids. Jared showed the girls a demo (with a stick) of how they can injure you so they would get scared and hopefully never play around the traps...Wish us luck as we continue our rat war this week!
