We covered this in detail in my master gardener’s course on pests- mice are surprisingly habit driven, and tend to do poorly when relocated. It’s not that they can’t find food or water- it’s that they may not be able to (which is why I phrased it that way originally) and will likely suffer while they adjust to their new location, if they manage to adjust at all.
Add to that not having a home and hiding places in the new spot, competition from other already-resident mice, and so on, the humane thing is just to kill them outright, although it’s not the feel-good option of letting them run free as nature intended.
Ah yeah, her reasonable response of facetious faux-outrage saying she won’t attempt the project now because of the author’s gendered language. Give me a break.
I think it’s more human to kill them with a mousetrap. I think mousetraps were even created as a better alternative to killing them with poison. One snap and they’re dead… probably.
Poison isn’t a good solution. Just got for a quick-kill trap.
Poison works its way up the food chain. The concept is called biomagnification. The amount needed to kill a mouse is tiny, but predators eat lots of mice and the dose of the poison that they get is much higher.
It’s a pretty quick way to kill all the neighborhood cats.
Or maybe not, since you’re not a father. But he is (with two daughters), which is why he titled it thus. But I’ve had a good time making some of those projects with my son, as well as with my daughter.
House mice fare very poorly in the wild. They’re invasive and adapted to living around humans. Native mice should be able to fare in the wild (or very quickly get eaten by predators), though they’re less likely to wind up in your house. We did get a couple hispid cotton rats that found their way into our house after extended heavy rains. We trapped them and let the go in a habitat they preferred out in the sticks. No way I was going to kill those, they didn’t want to be in the house and would have starved if we didn’t free them.
