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This little guy is much cuter than the real ones
in your pantry
Mice are cute individually. However, they cease to be cute (and trust me on this one), when they are scurrying out of the radiator in your bedroom and eating you paper towels just to mess with you. I believe city mice to be a different breed: smarter, quicker, and total assholes. This is why I was so distraught to find that our apartment was more popular with mice than rehab is with young celebrities.
So how do you get rid of these little suckers? I understand a lot of my readers may be environmentalists, vegetarians, vegans, fruitarians (hey, whatever works), so here is my disclaimer: please let me know if you have had any success getting rid of mice without having them murdered, and I will immediately suggest it. I basically know no other way than killing the furry little rodents, although I tried everything else. With that said, this is the advice I have to offer.
One thing I do NOT suggest are glue traps. Nothing will make you feel like a worse human being than finding a mouse on the glue, screaming in the throes of death. Also, you will step on the glue traps and get them stuck to your sock. I’m just telling you that this will definitely happen.
My roommate Emily (AKA ‘The Mouse Whisperer’) completed extensive research on the topic, and it was suggested that mice hate pure peppermint extract (you can put it on cotton balls) and dryer sheets. After having lined my walls with things that most people thought were trash, I felt better but it didn’t really help much.
Next we tried a mouse sonar system that emitted a high frequency sound that only mice could hear. I’m fairly certain this was 100% ineffective, but at least we felt like something was being done. Our apartment was also littered with spring traps that didn’t catch one of them – I believe city mice are too smart for those things. The little traps that “lure” the mouse in and then lock don’t work either, even with peanut butter in the middle; the closest this trap got to catching anything was catching me when I was ravenous and hadn’t gone grocery shopping in a month.
They will steal your food and might give
you salmonella.
Now down to my serious recommendations: bug your landlords. Seriously, bug them to death. This would appear to be common sense, but you would be shocked at how many of my off-campus friends barely speak with their landlords unless a scalding hot water pipe bursts in their bedroom. It is your right as a tenant to live in a safe and clean environment, and mice are disease-ridden little creatures that steal your food.
After you have contacted your landlord, you need to know exactly what you want done, and what you want done is a hot exterminator; I don’t just say this because it is a somewhat amusing sexual innuendo. I say this because our exterminator was hot, and this might have led to his magical powers. He came once every Thursday, plugged up more holes the mice were sneaking through each week, put wire mesh behind my radiator, and left poison pellets pretty much everywhere. He strategically placed traps where they actually worked, and within weeks the mice had left our home.
Once again, I apologize for all the death and destruction present in this article, and if you know another way, alert me immediately. Good luck with your mouse troubles.