OT- bait for mouse traps?

im going to be a contrarian and say some rodents avoid peanut anything because some of the glue traps are scented with peanut.

once they have a traumatic encounter with one they are actually conditioned to be strongly adverse to the smell. my go to is a little piece of gristle or a chicken bone (with a remnant of flesh) that you can really hook under the trigger so they have to pull on it. I also spray paint the trap a splotchy light gray or black. as cammo. they are smart enough to recognize them if they've had a near miss. a little barbecue sauce rubbed into the wood of the trap helps too.

if I'm up against a really wily critter, ill put the trap in a box in a plastic garbage bag with a hole in it, because that's where the food is usually, and if its dark in there, they are less likely to be able to strip it without tripping it.

I am up against some really smart, tough city rats here though! pretty brazen and fearless, basically I'm expecting to find them one day in a little recliner smoking a little cigar..

My son when he was two years old, got his toe stuck on one of those peanut butter smelling sticky pads for catching mice. Pulled his foot back from the microwave cart and there was a live mouse stuck on the pad along with his toe. Close counter of the fourth kind!!! That was twenty something years ago, we still laugh about it today. He sure didn't think so.

Water bucket trap. See also "Mousetrap Monday" for mousetrap reviews.

i seldom had success with the snap traps
use the electric (battery powered) zapper
and i use peanut butter and it works every time but not with the snap traps

Peanut butter, ketchup, dog kibble, in that order. If the death trap doesn't work then I switch to the glue trap with a bit of peanut butter in the middle as a last resort, which hasn't failed yet.

I have used the log-roller style water bucket traps to good effect. Used Anti Freeze, in the winter (No pets had access to my shop) and the mice would be dead about ten or fifteen seconds after hitting minus 20 coolant.

Have had better than average results, with, of all things, a stainless steel salad bowl. Cottoned on to it when we were finding mice skittering around (sometimes as many as five at a time) in the dog's kibble bowl. They would run like hell, get up the side until they ran out of momentum and traction, and slide back into the middle. No traction to jump out, either, they could only jump pretty much straight up, and landed back in the bowl. Chuck a couple pieces of dog kibble or cat food in there and leave the bowl where the mice have easy access.

I liked the basic Victor snap traps, I never had any problems getting the buggers to try for the peanut butter, though I seldom used more than just a smear. Put some in the rolled up metal end of the trigger on the metal trigger ones, or a smear on the underside of the triggers that are larger and made of plastic, was my go-to.

Never found that they seemed to figure out the traps, caught many mice with brand new as well as very used traps. For a while, outside Edmonton, I had a regular trapline in my Garage/shop, with a dozen or more snap traps plus a bucket drowning trap, using a soda or water bottle as the 'roller'. When the buggers would move indoors, I could put a row of snap traps facing the wall under the bench, and pretty much count on four mice in five or six traps.

For a bit of money, Victor sells their Tin Cat repeating moustrap. You wind it up and place it along a likely run, the mice can enter from either side, and when they hit the trigger the spring mechanism sweeps them in to a holding area in the trap for disposal. I have seen one or two of those that were forgotten about, and had been packed quite tightly with fur, the remains of the earlier mice having been eaten by the later catches, until the machinery unwound, or jammed up...

Peanut butter to act as glue so they can not sang the bait and run away.b Bait with salami or cooked bacon for the smell stuck into the peanut butter.
Trigger should be facing the wall so they have to walk over the trigger to move along the wall. They prefer to walk parallel to the wall with whiskers just touching the wall. I like to tie a long string or ribbon to the trap to make it easy to see and pick up while staying away from the fleas jumping off the carcus.
Bill D.

PEANUT BUTTER DOES NOT WORK!!!

I am telling you these are some sort of crazy mice they don’t take bait.
The traps sit for days weeks months and NO SQUISHED MICE.

A friend says these city mice “get smart” and apparently that’s the damn problem- smart mice….

I've done ok with gummy bears. But not the red ones.

I have had bad luck with any and all traps except the glue ones. We had a mouse in the house for weeks that would avoid any bait in the trap including peanut butter. So I tried different types of traps including the one with the bucket with water in the bottom, did not work! The first night the glue trap was put out, we had a dead mouse in the morning. As for rats in the shop, they avoid traps also but seem to like eating rat poison which goes under a work bench where the dogs can't get to.

FredC said:

I forgot what that disease that mice get that causes them to be attracted to the smell of a cat. But that is a real thing. I saw a mouse tail being repeatedly stuck out an air conditioning duct with the cat sitting by the duct. For an infected mouse cat smell is an attractant.

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That's toxoplasma gondii, a single celled parasite. Mice are it's intermediate host, cats are it's final host, so it has a big incentive to get it's mouse eaten by a cat. Fun fact, if humans get infected with it (from their cats) they indulge in riskier behaviors, like driving while drink and having sex with strangers. Might be worth asking a lass if she had cats before you buy her a drink.

As for mouse bait, if chunky peanut butter isn't working, a piece of KitKat never failed me. I always tried the peanut butter first though as I hate that stuff but really like chocolate.

Hot melt glue a conglomerate of nuts, sunflower seeds, dog and cat food to the trigger.
Need have options for the picky ones.

Bacon.
There’s nothing it can‘t do.

For this the stringy gristle part.

Sticky traps don’t work.
I got desperate as I don’t like them and no go- mice avoided them.

Back when we had a big rat problem I put out ten traps and it was just like this- damn guys would tiptoe through them to get to the pantry and start pushing goods off the shelf in the middle of the night.
It’s weird.
Rats have always been tough to trap but mice dead easy.
Now the mice are as hard to trap as the rats..

Tried bacon- nope
I’m ready to try poison but that’s tough with dogs.

Trboatworks said:

PEANUT BUTTER DOES NOT WORK!!!

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I have never had any luck with peanut butter either, they ignore it.

Tried a bucket trap in the shop, first with peanut butter, then with oatmeal cookie dough, caught nothing. The next night there were a bunch of people at the shop and dinner was tacos and hot sauce, wrappers and salsa containers all went in one garbage can which got shoved up against a toolbox before closing, next morning there were almost 20 mice in the garbage can. We replicated that trap for a week to get them all, the wrappers may have had a good smell, but nothing to eat, the half empty salsa cups included as bait were always empty the next morning and had holes chewed in them.

Shock/ zap traps work very well
Clean them first thing every morning
The water bucket roller traps work well too
As stated before , clean and handle with rubber gloves
Human scent has trained them

You can’t just trap alone though
You’ve got to put out green poison/ bait

Not mentioned here, but never fails to catch those bait stealers is a small marshmallow smashed tightly to the trigger. They just won't give up getting it all. Works on the most cunning, wily and stealthy mice. Never had a miss yet.

Haven’t tried it myself but a dude on YouTube said mice and rats can’t burp and thus a concoction of 1/2 cornmeal and 1/2 baking soda can be left out for them. After eating this they bloat up and die. I’m gonna try this in my outside shed.