Mouse farts.

They have to come out to eat, so set traps, that way you get rid of bodies.

That's true pompa. It will have to be traps. How awful. Maybe I could try some humane ones and send them away on holiday.

Humane traps are inhumane - the poor things sit in there trapped, terrified and sweating, and if you do not get to them till the next morning they sometimes suffocate in the trap. Better a quick splat we decided. There is also the problem of what to do with the mouse you have caught - you really do have to drive them a long way away to release them or they just wander straight back in.

I did read somewhere that two lies away works, no nearer or they are back the next day. So, humane is inhumane? That's very interesting. We used to have humane traps in the garden until we realised we would be ferrying mice around East Angular every day. Then we just gave up and decided that as long as they didn't come too far indoors we would just pretend they didn't exist. Despite them eating my raspberries, strawberries, marrows... Three pairs of leather boots...

DBH is all for pulling up the carpet and floorboards and putting poison down, and sleeping downstairs for a few weeks. The mice are getting into his dreams. He dreamt he was orchestrating squeaks and farts last night.

Do you drive while telling the two lies, or walk? It makes a difference to the distance. Two walking lies would hardly get me to the front gate.

Can you lie through your teeth?

Elgran

Moving mice out of their home territory, and therefore into the territory of other mice, means that they get attacked and usually killed by the mice in the new territory. So it is more humane to use good traps that kill them instantly.

This must be the first time I have heard people say that it is kinder to finish them off quickly. It's quite refreshing. I would rather do that because I would like to decrease the population - the year before last East Angular had a dreadful population explosion of rodents because it was so dry everywhere.

Elegran - DBH or I would drive them to the woods on our way to work, after collecting up the night's catch.

We always put poison down outside as the granules are coated with an attractant and we don't want the little b****rs coming in looking for it. DH fills the bait stations once a week and we usually get through a £30 tub every winter.

Well worth it though.

I do use it outside. I put in in the greenhouses as they always burrow their way in to keep warm over the winter. That disappears really fast. Also under the sheds. Heaven knows how many of them there are out there - or in here!

An update.

I still have mice and saw one this morning as I sat up in bed. Neither of us were all that impressed with each other.

Not a single mouse has been caught in a trap.

The huge box of poisoned grain is disappearing at an alarming rate, so either as one dies, another takes its place, or we have a huge family living somewhere. Or, DBH's favourite theory, we have a family at either end of the house.

DSis and farming OH were here over the weekend, and he says that mice now have learnt to strip the outer blue coating from normal grain, so we should all be buying teeny linseed servolex. My grains haven't been stripped but as yet, they don't seem to be working. Or maybe I am right, and we live on the path of a big mouse run and will never be free, like people who live in old barns who have no idea that they are housing the descendants of thousand-year-old mouse dynasties.