Effective Mice Control in the Kitchen

Controlling mice in your kitchen area is obviously desirable as this is where you store most of your foodstuffs. Most people start out using snap traps to address the problem, but an article by Kitchen Chick shows that you don’t always have to use snap traps to eliminate the problem, as you can effectively combine that with other, less cruel ways to achieve a similar end result.

In her article, The War Against Mice: Update, Kitchen Chick started out using peppermint-scented cotton balls as a deterrent against mice. This worked well for a while, but the scent soon tended to wear off, leaving cotton balls with no smell that were highly desirable to the mice as nesting materials. Realizing that strong scented smells can effectively deter the mice. Kitchen Chick then turned to Bounce, a commercial product, consisting of paper sheets impregnated with a strong scented fragrance. This was used to good effect in combination with a reduced number of snap traps in unprotected areas.

The strongly scented Bounce sheets, while deterring the mice, did present a potential problem of tainting foodstuffs in the kitchen, so they had to be used sparingly to some degree. This is why snap traps were also used to catch mice that were more determined. However, the same result could be gained by using electronic mouse traps or humane mouse traps.

Here are our thoughts at Pest Control Products:

An electronic mouse trap will kill a mouse in a few seconds. There is no possibility of the kind of injury and subsequent suffering a snap trap can inflict when it fails to kill the mouse. A humane mouse trap captures the mouse alive, and in a similar way that the strongly scented Bounce sheets merely move the mice away to somewhere else, it lets you release the mouse safe and alive, but far away enough where that will not return again to your kitchen.