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Watch How This Clever Design for a DIY Humane Mousetrap Works
It's made from books, bottles and other common household items
Glue traps are the most inhumane way to catch rodents, as they've been known to chew their own limbs off in order to escape. It's a reprehensible solution. So if you live in an area where setting captured, unharmed mice free in the wild is an option, you may want to consider this humane design, dreamt up by Canadian tinkerer Chris Notap.
In addition to not harming the critter, an excellent thing about the design is that it shouldn't cost you anything. Everything Notap uses in his contraption is liable to already be lying around your house somewhere. And yes, he provides a demonstration of the trap in action:
I suppose you'll have to select a bottle with a mouth large enough for your intruder. With any luck you won't have to go up to the Gatorade bottle size, but if you do, perhaps you ought be patching up your house first.
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Comments
It's a sweet idea and well done from a physics perspective, but it's also a really bad idea, for several reasons. One, mice have wonderful incisors, so unless you stand guard over the trap waiting for it to work, you're going to find a mouse-sized hole in your plastic.
That's not the most important part, though. For one, as Ed Jones mentioned, mice can carry diseases, including hanta virus. Moving wildlife from an area can spread diseases and other pathogens from infected areas. A prime example of this is the invasion of raccoon rabies in the NE United States after a large population of raccoons was moved from a rabies enzootic area (Florida) into an area where there was no raccoon rabies (West Virginia). Over the following decades, the explosion of raccoon rabies as far as Maine and across into Canada has cost millions of dollars. Moving one mouse might not cause such an outbreak, but it's still a bad idea. Second, nature hates a vacuum, so if you remove an animal from an area you simply encourage immigration of more animals to fill the gap. Third, every animal has a home range - the area where it lives, eats, etc. For a grizzly bear the home range can be quite large. For a mouse, not so much. When you move an animal outside of its home range, you put in the home range of others of its species that are already living there. In most cases the newcomer will be harassed until it's killed or will starve to death.
When it comes to problem wildlife, the American Humane Society recommends finding out what's attracting them and making it as unattractive as possible. With mice this can be tricky as a house mouse needs a hole not much larger than a pencil diameter. However, if you can't keep them away, the Humane Society recommends euthanasia over relocation. It's more humane.
I recommend putting a dab of paint or nail polish on the back of the mouse. That way you can tell when they start coming back into your house. Dropping the mouse off a long distance away only moves the problem into somebody else's house.
Pretty nifty. Can't see why it wouldn't work. I would opt for a little more angle on the mouse-filled bottle perhaps.