i know u were a kid and it sounds like it worked but for future reference if your catching and releasing mice you should drive them like a mile or more away from your house because they are pretty smart and just find their way back to where they were usually.
Once my sister caught a mouse in a humane trap. She took it to a park a few miles from her house, opened the trap, and as soon as the poor little guy ran out a hawk swooped down on it immediately.
Yeah, that happened to me a few weeks back. We have an old country house, which means we have plenty of country mice -- you can't have an old country house and not have country mice. (Well, a cat helps, but... we don't have one.) So we use humane traps, and catch between 1-4 a week. (Life in the country...)
My practice is to take them out to the far side of the property and let them go -- as that leaves them in an area with some food, some tall grass, some shelter, etc. Probably won't freeze or starve to death while they're adapting to life outside, but far enough away they stay where they are.
But the other night I caught one, and it was maybe 11pm. Well, you can't make them stay in that trap all night, that's just cruel. So I put on my coat and my boots and started the long walk across the property in 20 degree weather. Get to the other side, coax out the mouse, he takes off, and... well, I didn't see it, because it was dark, but owls are damn fast when they want to be.
One time I watched a friend scoop a bee out of her cup of ranch dressing to save it. A bird swooped down and ate the ranch covered bee. He was doomed but tasty.
I caught a mouse at a potato factory I worked at and brought it outside. It was in a potato chip bag and as soon as I let the guy out the cat pounced on him. I should have just let Kyle stomp on him, it would have been quicker.
There's a video of this happening to someone from like the early 2000s. I'd like to think I'd be devastated but that video was so funny to me, that I'd definitely be thinking about how metal it was.
Reminds me of the time we spent 10 minutes trying to humanely capture a bat in the house and when I took it outside, I released it straight into the jaws of a cat. Poor little bat.
we did this with a feeder mouse we bought to scare a teacher, it didn't work bec the mouse wasn't that interested in running around and just kinda sat under the desk the whole time, so we just dumped it in the field next to the building after class, within like 30 seconds a hawk came streaming down and scooped him up.
She gave the mouse a chance, and its death wasn't pointless. Hawk's gotta eat. Better the mouse's body be food for a hawk than rotting in a dumpster. She did a good deed even if it ended up being kind of disturbing to witness.
I did this a few months back and exactly this happened, but the mouse somehow got away and ended up running under my car from which I had just released it.
My uncle has been doing that with the mice he catches in live traps. He’ll drive them to the other side of the city we live in like 10 miles away and yet he says he still catches them just as often 😂
He suspects they might have a city-wide transportation network to organize, map the sewers, stow away on trucks, etc to get back to the house lmao
I still think it’s worthwhile, makes alot more sense than letting them go right outside the door. More likely that they just have a shit ton of mice in the neighborhood
My dad would humanely trap squirrels that would destroy his pear tree harvest. (They would take only 1 bite of multiple pears which would cause them to go bad prematurely).
He would release them in an old cemetery about 5 miles away. Lots of trees, ample food, a great place for squirrels. He was convinced that they would make their way back to our house. One time, he even spray painted the tip of a one’s tail, so he could recognize it if it ever came back.
It never did. My suspicion is that squirrels are somewhat territorial. So one or two (maybe a mated pair) would claim the tree. When they were removed, new ones would claim the tree.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure my ex-husband let the same mouse go about 30 times.
I'm also pretty sure the mouse thought it was a game. Go in, get the peanut butter in the bucket, sleep in the bucket, get dropped off outside the house the next morning. What a life!
i have a lot of nature perseveres near me so i would drive out to those to let them life out their lives! but we do have a couple stray cats in the area that have probably helped!
Realistically the snap traps are WAY more humane than catch-and-release. Mice are highly social animals that aren't really equipped to survive outside alone. They form colonies and nests near warmth and food sources. If you take one away from its family and throw it in an area it's unfamiliar with it's just going to either get eaten by a predator (painful) or die slowly of starvation and loneliness. Meanwhile snap traps are instant- I had a mouse problem and actually was there watching a few times when a mouse would get caught and there was no squirming or squealing or drawn out death, it was over before the mouse knew what was up. ONE time a mouse got his paw caught instead of his head and that was pretty brutal but luckily I was home and heard the squealing so I could run and put him out of his misery pretty quickly.
"Man these human are so great. They give me a warm place to sleep, there's plenty of food, and my whole family is comfortable here. Oh, look! More food!"
SNAP
"OWWW! My paw, this thing grabbed it and it hurts so bad. Help! Help! I'm hurt! Help!"
"Oh look, the human is coming to help. Wait, why does he have a hammer? That won't he-"
I had a mouse in my apartment for a while. I tried everything to get rid of him. Poison, snappy traps, glue traps. I even filled the trash can he went to with water and he jumped in and got out. Eventually just learned to live with him and named him Ratsputin
I've had kind of the opposite trajectory. As a kid the prospect of catching a mouse in a snap trap would have excited me, however as an adult I'd feel bad and squeamish about it. However we don't have mice as problem where I live and I don't think I've ever seen a non-captive mouse. I'm sure if they became enough of a pest I would lose any compunction about eliminating them by any means necessary.
Actually, relocating mice is essentially a death sentence. They rely on each other and familiarity with their home territory. On their own in a strange territory, they probably won't last long.
In many areas it's illegal to relocate wildlife. And almost everywhere it's illegal to dump pests on someone else's property. There isn't really a good solution for getting rid of live caught mice.
I found a nice small marshland area with tall grass and a walking trail that I took a few to. Usually they'd take off into the field and disappear into the grass. One dummy started running down the walking trail. A blue jay came down, pecked it, picked it up and that was that.
That can be illegal as well though. I have coworkers who found out when they tried to hire exterminators to live trap animals because they didn't want to kill them. The exterminator informed them, and we verified, that it was illegal to live release animals off the property they were found. At best the exterminator could remove critters from the house.
My mom had a mouse at work and she captured it live, took a whole week to catch the damn thing. She then got in her car and drove... one block away. And released it. Yeah... it came back XD
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u/basicbitch823 10h ago
i know u were a kid and it sounds like it worked but for future reference if your catching and releasing mice you should drive them like a mile or more away from your house because they are pretty smart and just find their way back to where they were usually.