Now, I gotta say that I am both unhappy and a tiny bit amused that with all my farm and house cats that a fat sneaky mouse ended up in the one very rarely used cuboard..
Needless to say out came a mouse trap with some peanut butter and within an hour, snap, everything got hauled out and washed and wiped with bleach water, and then the little hole was found, stuffed with steel wool and two more traps set out just in case.
Last night on the local news, they showed that a local childrens park was closed due to there being a local rat population, I’m sorry that they closed the park but here comes the interesting part, the first thing they showed afterwards was truly lovely big raised garden beds and with a qoute right along the lines of ” there was a community garden right near by that may have helped attacted them” then they also showed garbage cans, and reminded folks to have tightly fitted garbage can lids.
Now this really caught my attention because they were not showing a compost pile or anything like that, these were clearly well cared for, cleaned and perfectly bare (no green cover) raised beds with neatly mowed lawn around them, and yet somehow the community gardens were the top reason that the rats had moved in.. Not good for the general public’s view of the postives of a community garden.
We did have rats move in on the farm in our first summer here, along with a thriving mouse population as my DH did not believe in barn cats, only in indoor house cats, now poison was out, no way was I having that on the farm, so we drew our lines in the sand, no barn cats was his, and mine was,then figure out a way to get rid of the rats and level out that mouse population, he got this trap and that trap, he made rat catching buckets and some got caught but the population continued to grow, we moved all feed into steel rat/mouse proof garabage cans, I found and bought metal wood holding box’s and moved them into the barns for holding extra’s and I was extra careful on bleaching down my milking stand and got more and more vocal about the fact that this was NOT GOOD!
It came to a head one day when DH had feed the chickens and was just standing there to enjoy their happy clucking, and as he was standing still, the mice all came out to enjoy dinner with the chickens, first one, then three, then four, then more.. in the end, hubby came in and said that there had to be a dozen and just to add insult to injury, a rat had taken his rat trap when it got caught and hauled it away 😛
Needless to say our first barn cats were introduced the next day, It took them a bit to get attached to the buildings and they were locked up with food/water and litter box till they got more comfortable, Since then I have never seen any showing of a rat colony, the cats do bring home the odd rat to leave as a gift on the doorstep, but mainly they bring mouse or moles as gifts, they don’t just hunt my land but all the farm land around our farm is also hunted, some of them are more homebodies and are always around and some of them hunt both in fields and in the woods, but when winter comes, they all take advantages of the barn setup for them, including the their big heated waterbowl.
As this is the time of the year that the mice will be doing their best to head into the houses, how do you deal with this in your own area, do you trap? do you use bait? do you have farm cats? If you don’t use Bleach, what do you use to clean the area that you find mouse droppings?
Just another Day on the Farm 
I was just thinking it was time to get on this. I use bait in the basement and attic and traps in the rest of the house, although the bait usually does the trick. I get the stuff not made of warfarin because one year we got over run with meadow voles of all things, and warfarin doesn’t harm them apparently. The foundation of the house is field stone, so there’s just no way to keep them from getting inside (we get snakes too!) so it’s just part of life. Still no where near as bad as when we lived in the city. One year it was so bad I would set a trap in the kitchen and I would no sooner get to the livingroom and would hear the snap and have to turn around. I think my record was 8 in one evening like this. If we turned the tv off and sat quietly they would come out and look at us! Nasty.
Hi Daisy, Yes, its the time of year they tend to move in, I can see your point about the foundation, your story of eight in one evening, reminds me of the story my mom used to tell about they moved into a old old farm house and dad went to work and that night the mice came out, and my mom said they were everywhere, she wire off grates and steel wooled everthing she could think of, and could here them trying to get in when it was quiet as well.. I was there but don’t remember it, but heard the story lots as it was listed as part of the reason that she didn’t like them.
Love your story … Winston Churchill once said, ‘You could always count on the Americans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried everything else’. One could perhaps attribute this to husbands, on occasion.
O yes, I would agree with that, of course the same could be said of me at times 😉
We have two cats. One is a hunter and one is not. Plus we have a rat terrier. So we have two hunters. If there are rat droppings in the kitchen, DH puts out traps. Sometimes they ignore them. I’ve heard they can’t resist a Snickers bar, though! lol
Its true some cats will hunt and others, could not care less, is your pup a good hunter, does he like to do the job he was breed to do? A snickers bar huh, I will have to pass that one for what is the best rat bait..
Nasty? You bet! Mice follow the smell of the track they lay down while running back and forth in the dark through their own urine & feces. EW, YUCK!!! Bleck! Gag!!
Funny how you look at things so differently as an adult, eh? I used to love those soft, cute little beady-eyed rodents: even had one as a pet (‘course didn’t know about the shit-tracking thing back then either; )