What do you do with the mice that get caught in a humane mouse trap?

Give them to someone that live feeds snakes or other predatory lizards.

@WestRiverrat Is it common practice that most local pet shops accept these sort of donations?

I don’t know about pet shops, they probably have some government standards they have to adhere to.
I used to give mine to the guy across the hall when I lived in the dorms at school. He had a rattlesnake that he kept until the school found out and made him get rid of it.

Drive the the edge of town, let them go.

That or go down the road a few blocks and let them out into a sewer and let them be someone else’s problem.

Pet shops will not take wild mice.
Just take them away and release them somewhere. Don’t forget that mice are the number one food for snakes and birds of prey of all kinds.Hawks,owls. etc.
Put them back in nature to benefit all the natural mice eating predators.

@Deshi_basara Mice don’t live in sewers, that’s a myth. Field mice live in houses and fields. They are seed and fruit and insect eaters.
Only city rats frequent sewers, mostly as habitual travel pathways, they don’t LIVE in wet, sewers with no food or nesting materials. Neither do mice.
Rodents don’t eat shit or live in it.

Just use a WetVac. Release them in the yard of anyone you dislike. Good times, good times.

In my area people do that with squirrels and let them loose in the park across the street from my house. They selfishly think nothing of passing their problem on to others.
We had such an issue with them my neighbor and I had to do something about it. Over the past 2 years I have taken out over 300 and fed them to the fox and coyote in the area.

I know I am the bad guy here but if you’ve had car wires chewed, car interiors damaged, bird feeders destroyed, critters running in your attic, you’d do something about it too.

@_Whitetigress Check the rules in your area. It might not even be legal to trap and release a wild animal in your state.

Think of it as sharing….

@LuckyGuy Just like me having the trapper out for the coyotes a few years ago.Sometimes ya gotta thin the herd.

Or re-gifting….it’s a gift that keeps on giving.

I relocate mine to greener pastures, at least five miles away. There are acres of woodland and old pasture here so it is easy.

@cheebdragon:

When I am feeling surely, I dump them on the edge of the property of a former friend, who was unkind and then indifferent. when I really needed my friends

@cheebdragon How would someone do that? Every household mouse I’ve ever seen runs away faster than they could be caught

Most catch and release sites suggest you take them at least 5 miles away and release into an unoccupied area.

@YARNLADY: I have caught, with absolutely no effort, 10 mice in as many days in a Havahart baited with a little organic almond butter. The mice are very much alive and well.

I have not chased after one; MIlo does, from time to time, and always gets his man mouse. But they never live to tell the tale.

@gailcalled Haha…years ago I had a pet rat I named “Nancy” after an obnoxious boss I had at the time. It would make me burst out laughing every time she walked by. lol

Eidt: I cannot understand how spell-check can sneakily change something while I am blinking.

Not surely but surly, as in bad-tempered.

@Coloma She’s not trying to raise the damn things shes trying to get rid of them. What does she care where they end up? Even more so, releasing them in a sewer means they’re gonna have to work harder to pester her a second time. Must you nit-pick about things that truly don’t matter?

@Deshi_basara It matters. I believe ALL life forms have a right to live as they were designed to live. If you’re going to live trap something why in the world would you then, not release it into a suitable habitat?
Better to just flat out kill something than to be inhumane in its “disposal.”
Irrational.
Just kill the poor things instead of prolonging their suffering by dumping them in an environment they can’t survive in.

“Oooh, I’ll live trap this mountain lion and then dump it in the middle of San Francsico.”
Oxymoronic.

I had a problem (or should I say “have”) where a mouse was coming into my kitchen drawer. Several times I had to take the utensils out of the drawer, clean it out, clean them and the whole nine yards. I got a little Have-a Heart trap and put it in there and finally caught the mouse (is it one of many? not sure). I took him about ¼ mile away and let him out just this morning. He was wet with his urine, the poor thing, and the trap stunk with the urine in it, so I just threw the whole thing out. The trap only cost about $2 and change at Walmart so for me, it’s easier to just chuck the whole thing than to take it and have to put on gloves and take out outside and hose it off and clean it properly for next time. Having this gross thing lying around until I took care of it just did not seem like it was worth it. I’d rather just get a new one.

@YARNLADY Oh you’d be surprised as to how slow they are in large open space. Well at least I think they are. Inside a home when they run against the wall and edges it only seems fast. But I’ve trapped two mice on separate occassions put them outside in the yard where they escaped and I’ve caught up to them easily. In large open area’s they get confused easily

It is possible to set one trap, catch a mouse every 2 days and never eliminate the problem. It is a rare mouse indeed that lives alone. Usually there is a family lurking nearby with cousins, aunts and uncles just waiting for this family to leave so they can grab the new rent controlled place. With a 6 week gestation period and a typical litter of 6–8 they multiply fast. You can also figure there is a 15%-20% chance the mouse you just saw is pregnant. A single trap cannot possibly keep up.
When I see a mouse, I immediately set out 16 (or more) snap traps in various locations and orientations using different baits. I have never, I repeat, NEVER, caught just one. Usually by the time I see just one I end up trapping about 6 in one or two days. I try to hit them hard and fast to get the whole family at once.
I do not want to open my utensil drawer and be greeted with little presents from Mickey and his pals every morning. Maybe I am just fussy but I think it is a waste of my time and resources to have to wash all the utensils each morning because some mouse decided that was a good place to poop. Nope. I wipe them out as fast as I can. That way I don’t have to worry about it for another year.

Here’s one more thought for you. A live-caught young mouse will emit an ultrasonic distress call that will attract any adult female within earshot. Read that again. If you capture a young mouse it will call to all females in the area with almost 1 in 3 being pregnant. Do you want them in your home? A properly set Victor snap trap will do the job quickly (12 ms), efficiently, and cheaply. Get the real Victor snap traps – not the cheap chinese knock offs.
Victor traps cost about $2.00 for a pack of 4.

@Coloma I understand why you had to thin the herd of coyote in your neighborhood. With no top predator they too begin to multiply out of control. After they finish off all the wild cats in the area, your pet geese would start looking like food.

@Yarnlady it’s actually pretty easy to get them with the WetVac, we had a pretty bad mouse problem a few years ago. It ended the night one crawled up my pant leg, lol, after I was done freaking out, I got the WetVac out and daisy (my min-pin) & I went through the entire house hunting down mice all night long. We caught about 9–10 and haven’t had any mice since then.

@LuckyGuy I guess I have to hit up Amazon or eBay for the 75 mouse glue trap package. This war will waged, and it will be won!

^^^.How about 2 mice every day?

@_Whitetigress I’m glad you declared war. You have to go at it hard and fast like Sun Tsu recommended in Art of War. He was the true Father of “Shock and Awe”.
I do not like glue traps. They take too long and sometimes a clever foe can escape.
Use Victor Snap Traps. They are the fastest traps on the market. From release to closed is 12 ms! The cheap ones do not even come close.
Open 4 packages of clean traps and let them air out for a day. Then put them in a bag of bird seed and let them marinate for another day.or so. Then set them with whatever bait you like. Mix it up. Some bait should be sunflower seeds. Others should be baited with crunchy peanut butter. The traps will be irresistible! Mix up placement as well. Place some parallel to the wall. Place others perpendicular to the wall.
Make a map and keep track of how many you catch every day. You can use that data to run reliability growth curves to predict how many mice are in the house and how many are left. The more traps you have and the longer you run, the better the data.

@gailcalled Maybe we can enlist @Mariah to run the numbers for us. I’m sure she can work out an accurate simulation.

@LuckyGuy What no mouse catching ratio spreadsheets? Yer slackin’ bud, tsk, tsk.

@Coloma Oh I have them. Believe me, I have them. I just didn’t want anyone to think I was crazy and over the top. I use hard data and statistics data to make the determination of whether or not the mouse problem is solved.

^^^Will the camels you have on tap (should you run out of gas) eat mice?

Mouse #12 awaiting deliverance this morning.

@gailcalled The fox loves me for the bite sized morsels.
I forget if you are relocating the mice to a “higher plane in another dimension” or merely dropping them off at a neighbor’s house.
If you are doing the latter, know that they can return up to 1900 ft in one day. I remember reading about it in a university study on the homing patterns of mice. Whatever made your house or car attractive to that mouse will remain attractive.
You might be getting repeat offenders. Are you noticing that when released, the mice are getting quicker about leaving the cage? A first timer hangs on and needs to be shaken out. An experienced one leaps at the chance. (A bit like adult humans.)
To prove to yourself that it is not a repeat offender, use nail polish on a thin paint brush and mark the prisoner’s fur. You might be surprised.

I would be very surprised if one of my “relocated” mice returned. It has never happened.

Is it safe to put nail polish on mice? Catching a mouse in a trap or vacuum is different than touching a mouse, they can jump pretty high for being so small.

@cheebdragon What are you talking about? Nail polish? I don’t get it.
Vacuuming up mice is evil. 0-o

@cheebdragon My neighbor would put a swipe of nail polish on the mouse’s fur. He just stuck the brush in the cage – he was not doing its nails. :-)
He would let the mice go about 1000 ft away in the park but the next day he’d find one in the trap on the 3rd!!! floor of his house. He had one mouse return 5 times! Incredible
He now drives miles away to relocate.

I do not need to drive to perform my “relocation”.

@LuckyGuy Oooh, I see, mouse marking….that is amazing, I didn’t realize they had such strong homing instincts. Personally, I adore the big eyed and big eared Deer Mice out here. They are so damn cute.

They are cute. No question about it. But they are destructive and must be dealt with swiftly and decisively before they have a chance to do damage, or worse, reproduce! Their gestation period is 20 days. That cute little fur ball can be pregnant in 6 weeks.

@Coloma how is is using a wet vac evil? It doesn’t kill or hurt them.

@cheebdragon I’d think it would, but if not, sorry.

@cheebdragon I have a 3 hp Sears Shop vac. At the end of the intake hose inside the tank there is a solid baffle. Anything that gets sucked up into the tube gets smacked hard against it. I have sucked in yellow jackets right from the nest and there is not one alive at the bottom of the tank. They get squooshed against that plate. I imagine the mice would hit pretty hard – especially since they more or less fills the suction tube and probably accelerate pretty fast. Maybe your vacuum is not as powerful. Are the critters alive in there after you vacuum them up? I’m guessing if I sucked one up it would be “relocated to a higher plane” in an instant but I have no data.