Buy a better mousetrap

It's not if the animal will die. It's what death you choose to give them.

May 25, 2025

(Note: This piece is about mouse traps, and things that happen when you use them. And of course, this is my opinion. It may not be yours. And this is depressing. Apologies in advance.)

I’ve reached the time of year when my gardening is in full flood (and sometimes my garden itself in full flood, depending on rain), and so I end up at the hardware/garden store a lot. I’m trotting through the aisle in search of mortar when I spot a man at the mouse/rat trap section, loading up on glue traps.

Glue traps.

I said, “hey, please, those aren’t great, there are others that are better!”

I talked him into a different trap. It wasn’t a Havahart. Or a bait station with poison. I talked him into a snap trap. Because in many cases, it is the fastest death that is the most humane. Catch and release options often end up less humane than you might think. Because humans are doing the catching.

No House for Mouse

I don’t know if you yourself have had experience with mouse traps. At this point, I have more than enough. I have, after all, written a book on why we hate some animals. Before that, I spent nearly a decade as a mouse researcher.

This does not mean I take any pleasure in promoting the demise of rodents. Far from it. Mice or rats in your home or business are not just an annoyance. They are creatures that have learned to live with us, evolved to benefit from us (Are they domestic? Maybe, maybe not). They, like us, are just trying to get by.

I have sympathy for them, and I like them! From my years of experience, I know how clever and sweet they can be. Rats, especially, are snuggly and charming. I even did a photoshoot with a lovely pet rat named Magrat for my book, and she was so brilliant she didn’t pee on me once (I’d brought five shirts. In case). I used to work on behavior tests, and spent hours with mice in my lap, crawling all over me with tiny paws. I loved to give them treats.

If I had my way, I’d pop all the house mice in little carriers and haul them off elsewhere, somewhere nice with lots of grains and maybe some Froot Loops (mice love Froot Loops) where they can live out their lives. I like mice. I don’t want to hurt them.

But it’s not my house, and even if it was, I wouldn’t necessarily want mice hanging out in it (I’ve had mice before. I also have cats. The results were effective, but not pleasant). Aside from the sociological aspects (people see mice as signs of disorder, dirt, lack of hygiene, they are often afraid of small, quickly moving things they can’t see well), mice living too close to humans can spread disease. Leptospirosis, hantavirus, all of these come from being too close to mouse pee and poo, and mice do not have a talent for using the toilet.

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People don’t want mice in their houses. How we get them out, though, that can be fraught. For most of history, the answer has been traps. In my book, I documented clay mouse traps from the Indus Valley civilization, more than 4,000 years ago. The traps are little clay mailbox-type things with sliding doors, and what I thought to be air holes on the sides.

I mentioned the airholes to an archaeologist, who gently corrected me. The holes are to let the water in when you drown your catch (he knows this because traps like them are still used today). Ancient peoples weren’t any more softhearted about mice than we are.

A better mousetrap. Or at least more options.

Now of course, we have built a better (?) mousetrap. I spoke with Tom Parr, the president of the North American Trap Collectors Association, and the owner of the Trap History Museum in Galloway, Ohio.

Parr says the first book on traps appeared around 1590 in England, with the riveting title “A booke of engines and traps to take polcats, buzardes, rattes, mice and all other kindes of vermine and beasts whatsoeuer, most profitable for all warriners, and such as delight in this kinde of sport and pastime.”

But the first traps that came to America with Europeans were no kind of marvelous “engines.” It was more the box held up with a stick sort of trap. The first better mousetrap to be built was in 1894, U.S. patent 528671 by William Hooker, for what we know today as the snap trap. The many, many, many variations on this which all got patents are the origin of the phrase “build a better mousetrap”, and Parr owns most of them. He also turned me on to the many, many, many books of traps (I now own most of them) compiled by the late, great David Drummond, with such titles as ‘NINETEENTH CENTURY MOUSE TRAPS PATENTED IN THE U.S.A.: AN ILLUSTRATED GUIDE.’ The traps are, honestly, amazing both for their creativity, and the creativity of the names: Catch-Em-Alive, Clown Face (it looks like you think, it’s horrid), and Out ‘O Sight. My personal favorite name is “Delusion,” because honestly that’s how we approach most of our pest extermination efforts.

A drawing of a mouse facing a mousetrap with a gun.

Parr’s museum has an entire room devoted to mice and rat traps throughout history. “I would say sixty percent are the kill type,” he says. The rest are live traps, from jars and cages to the Havahart. Many people are upset by the deadly snap, but “you know, in one sense, the instant kill type is probably as humane as the live traps,” he says. There’s single traps like the one you know from cartoons, and multi-catch.

In multi-catch traps, “there's a hole that is a one way drop door, [the mice] go in and then they can't get out. And they're seen by others, and it causes more to come in,” Parr says, “Well, what most of the people that utilize those do, once they get the amount of mice or rats that they can accumulate in there, they will drown them. And so that's what I'm saying, is that sometimes the instant kill is as humane as anything.”

I’ve never forgotten that.

He wasn’t the only one to say something. Other experts I talked to, from ecologists to people working in pest management, didn’t have much great to say. Rodents now (usually rats) die by poison in urban settings, and the second generation anticoagulant rodenticides are horrible ways to go. The animals bleed to death internally. If they are caught by a predator before they die, that predator feels the poison, too.

In mouse plague settings (usually Australia, but sometimes not!), other quicker poisons are used. The result is the same, the mice die away from the trap. Which means they die under floorboards. In walls. In holes. You had a mouse. Now you have the memory of a mouse that is going to live in your nostrils for weeks.

Glue traps, to my mind, are worse. The animal is stuck, and the more it struggles the more its stuck. If you don’t check the trap, the animal dies of thirst. If you do…I heard many stories during my reporting of people shrieking and throwing a still live mouse, with trap, into a dumpster. Glue traps are also nonspecific and will catch anything—from bugs to snakes to unsuspecting pets. I have freed small snakes from glue traps on many occasions.

Havahart, catching the animal and then releasing it elsewhere, seems like the absolute better choice. And they are! If you remember to check them. Because the problem with traps of all kinds, kill or no-kill, is that 90% of the time they are set, they don’t catch anything.

People set the traps with the best of intentions. They might check the trap every day, at first. Then every few days. But maybe they don’t catch anything, and the problem seems to go away on its own. They check the trap once a week.

By the time the trap works, and most people check, the animal has died of thirst. It’s not a glue trap. But it might as well be.

Even when people trap, check it often, and release, the options for the mouse aren’t good ones. Often, it’s near your house, and will come right back (mice can run 10k in a day without trouble). Relocate it near someone else’s house, and they may end up in there—with someone who would rather put down poison or glue. Release it far from humans, and mice often fare very, very badly. They are far from their territory, and often dropped right into someone else’s. They don’t know where the food, water, shelter, or predators are. The killing in this case is outsourced to local predators. Even larger animals like bears will travel hundreds of miles back to their original homes, or end up starving.

Dealing death

Back at the garden store, I told the guy the glue traps were no good. He agreed! In his previous experience, his mice wouldn’t go anywhere near them. But they’re easy, they’re just little pads of glue, everything else, he said, seemed too hard to use and ineffective.

He’d previously tried the small mouse traps with the poison inside, and noted he’d never found a mouse dead inside any one of them. I had to explain that that wasn’t the goal. Electric traps (which shock the animal, and are expensive) weren’t for sale, and neither were Havaharts. He wasn’t eager for no-kill anyway. He was just a guy, who had bought a house. The house had mice, he wanted them gone. Like many of us, when he was confronted with a frustrating problem, he wanted a quick solution.

I taught him how to use the snap trap. We unwrapped one, I showed him how to set it. I gave him bait options. I told him to be patient, it would take some time, some different baits. He bought 12.

I’ve been thinking about that guy all week. I still feel bad. Because when it comes to getting rid of the mice in your house, it’s not a matter of whether or not the animals will die. They will. Sooner or later. The only question is what kind of death they will receive. What kind of death you will give them.

References:

  1. Marquez A, Ulivieri T, Benoit E, Kodjo A, Lattard V. House Mice as a Real Sanitary Threat of Human and Animal Leptospirosis: Proposal for Integrated Management. Biomed Res Int. 2019 Jun 23;2019:3794876. doi: 10.1155/2019/3794876. PMID: 31341897; PMCID: PMC6612401.

  2. Manzanares G, Brito-da-Silva G, Gandra PG. Voluntary wheel running: patterns and physiological effects in mice. Braz J Med Biol Res. 2018 Dec 10;52(1):e7830. doi: 10.1590/1414-431X20187830. PMID: 30539969; PMCID: PMC6301263.

  3. North Carolina Resources and Wildlife Commission: WRC Will Not Trap Or Relocate Bears

  4. CDC: About Hantavirus.

Where have you been?

  • I’ve been thinking a lot about how many people are using AI to write their papers and do their homework (or grade their papers! And assign their homework!), or write their emails. And I wonder…why are people so quick to not think. To not create. To not try, and show the world what they can do?

  • A reason I think people are so eager to trust AI is because we’ve all spent too many years thinking that confidence = truth. Far, far from it.

  • If you think you don’t use federal science…think again! Your weather app runs on it. Your planes fly on it. Your drugs and food are safe because of it.

  • Screwworms, if you don’t know what they are, are horrifying! We eradicated them from the US, and had been holding the line against them in Panama. Until we weren’t.

  • Colossal, the company of the woolly mice and the “dire wolves” is now saying “just kidding! We never meant dire wolves! Not at all!” Next they will say, “Gaslighting? We don’t even know what that IS!”

  • When your fingers get wrinkled in the tub, they wrinkle along the lines of your tiny blood vessels! Amazing.

  • Humpback whales may get entangled in fishing nets so often because their eyes just can’t see them. The bad vision doesn’t matter for glomphing down loads of fish…until human nets are in the way.

  • The AMA has finally admitted that IUD insertion pain is a problem that a couple of Tylenol isn’t going to fix. Only took a long, sustained, viral social media campaign.

  • Stories about things getting worse until they finally reach a breaking point and there’s a big battle and everything is fixed seem really fun…until they are real life. Love this piece from Charlie Jane Anders.

  • The infected from the Last of Us are not coming. But if they did, y’all need to know our antifungals are not up to the task.

  • Many people might not be aware just how much research funding is disappearing. How many jobs people will lose. How many careers will disappear. And how many treatments, cures, and solutions will go un-found.

Where have I been?

It’s been a while, yes, which means I’ve had a lot of pieces publishing!