A glue trap in my garage caught a mouse. I consider it inhumane to let the mouse die in the glue trap. I am looking for a method to euthanize the mouse that meets the following requirements:
I am currently considering spending $20-$50 on a stun gun, but I'm not sure if a stun gun can kill a mouse in a few seconds.
Related questions:
CO2 in a sealed jar.. small piece of dry ice.. should be very painless, mouse would go unconscious before dying. The NIH abstract listed here agrees CO2 is an effective and pain free method:
Helium would also work, bit harder to dispense from balloon to kill jar.
Wear a thick glove, the gardening kind is preferred. Flip a Ziplock or similar plastic bag inside out and cover your glove with it. Firmly grab the mouse (and its associated trap) with your gloved, "plasticked" hand and with your free hand, roll the Ziplock back out so you can seal it completely, with the mouse trapped inside.
Lay it on the floor, preferably a driveway or garage. Whack the poor thing with a heavy magazine or a shoe; make sure you hit its head for near-instantaneous death. It has already suffered enough; this will help it pass on quicker.
After you do this, please make sure you remove all the glue traps your pest control folks installed.
Quick, humane, and approved by the United States Marine Corps. Ooh-rah!
'Course when you're done you have to clean out the waffle with a stick, but what the hell, you can't have everything, right?
According to Cait McKeown (a National Mice Club (UK) member and judge), the most humane method of mouse euthanasia is chloroform. Unfortunately, the chemical is hazardous (even deadly in high dosage) to humans as well as mice, so it's difficult to obtain. Also impractical for most people, veterinarians sometimes use halothane or another anesthetic gas. With these methods, the mouse becomes unconscious without pain before death.
Other methods, such as breaking the neck (cervical dislocation), decapitation, drowning, and freezing are painful for the mouse. This may or may not be an issue for you since these are not pet mice, but most people will have a difficult time in execution. The "quick" methods might not be so quick if you make a mistake.
Perhaps the best method is a CO2 chamber such as used by herpetologists before freezing rodents for food. The cheapest source of concentrated carbon dioxide is dry ice, but the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recommends compressed CO2 gas in cylinders [PDF] in order to control the inflow of gas. Their instructions are:
Without pre-charging the chamber, place the animal(s) in the chamber and introduce 100% carbon dioxide. A fill rate of about 10% to 30% of the chamber volume per minute with carbon dioxide, added to the existing air in the chamber should be appropriate to achieve a balanced gas mixture to fulfill the objective of rapid unconsciousness with minimal distress to the animals. (Example for a 10-liter volume chamber, use a flow rate of 1 to 3 liter(s) per minute.) Sudden exposure of conscious animals to carbon dioxide concentrations of 70% or greater has been shown to be distressful.
If you regularly use sticky traps to control mice, you might consider building CO2 chamber (there are plenty of designs out there). But I personally prefer using snap traps which provide a much quicker death and are easy to dispose of.
If two out of three is good enough, you can take the trap away from your house and pour a little vegetable oil on the mouse. The glue will dissolve and the mouse can scurry off.
I have done this many times. Here is how:
Bucket of water. You can hold the glue trap away from you.
It is quick, simple, quiet, and I believe humane.
You are correct that the glue board traps are not a humane way to address vermin. The best the mouse can hope for is to have it's nose stuck in the glue and die. If not, they tend to keep pulling and tearing until there is blood and it is a mess to look at.
First, find a better trap. Snap trap or something like:
Easy to clean, reusable, and fast kill.
If you still have glue boards with mice in them struggling, I would suggest putting into a paper sandwich bag, get a hammer, find the mark, and put it out of it's misery with two or three fast strokes. Use thick gloves when handling a loaded board.
Bag it, stick it in the freezer, wait less than an hour. I must admit though not all members of my household like this method.
Then find the hole the mouse entered through.
Smack it with a rolled up newspaper. No blood, no guts, and doesn't take a very hard whack. Take a magazine and slide it under, and dump in trash bag.
My method is to dig a small hole in the yard. Shovel up mouse/trap assembly and drop into hole. Stab/smash mouse quickly with shovel. Cover over with dirt. Stab shovel into nearby area of the lawn several times to clean any residue off. Doesn't get a whole lot quicker, and there's no mess. Plus, the mouse gets to become fertilizer for the lawn...
Add baking soda to a jar. Poke a hole in the top. Add the mouse. Add vinegar and quickly close the top. The CO2 is heavier than air and will mostly stay in the bottle.
I find the best way to do it is shoot it in the head with a BB gun. Quick with no mess. I couldn't imaging just stomping on it . That's kind of cruel.
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