Years ago I had a problem with one mouse. i knew it existed because every morning while I was still in bed I would hear it mull about in a section of my studio apartment and one time i spotted it as it darted behind a cabinet. Strangely, it never went into the kitchen and I had no idea what it lived on. Not knowing much about mice at the time, I was concerned the mouse might crawl on me when I slept and give me some nasty disease, so I set out to trap the mouse. I got one of those cartoon acme-esque mousetraps. I placed a tiny piece of of paper towel with a dab of peanut butter on it that sat on the "bait" section and set the snapping metal thing so the mouse would be crushed by the metal once he or she triggered the trap. I felt bad, but I considered it a health issue.

The next morning i heared the mouse. Strangely I didn't hear the trap snap and the mouse seemed to go away. I looked at the trap and noticed the paper towel was totally gone, but the trap was still un-triggered. It foiled me!

So then I visited a hardware supply store that sold mousetraps and noticed a trap called the "have-a heart" trap which promised effectiveness and won't kill the mouse. It was basically a small container that's placed at a certain angle so the mouse can easily enter it and then sort-of turns over and traps the mouse. $5 later, I placed it in the same spot as the cartoon mousetrap was. The next morning I was awoken to a "clunk" sound. I got up and saw the trap was activated. The container had tiny holes and I saw a little nose occasionally poke through the holes. It was kind of cute, actually. Not knowing any better way to dispose of this live mouse (I was not about to try to kill it and didn't want to fathom methods in doing so), I walked to a nearby park and opened the trap and the mouse immediately darted out and into some ivy to never be seen by me again. Interestingly, there was never a mouse issue in the apartment again. I figured if I ever saw any more, I'd spring about $15 for this trap. (it sounds like this one is best suited for Clive and his pals.)

About a year ago I listened to a radio program that briefly profiled a mouse exterminator and learned that catching a mouse is very easy. I learned that mice rarely move beyond a 10 feet radius in their lifetime. (You can listen to it here).

But you also need to sort out where they are getting in. A mouse can apparently get through a pencil sized gap!

At least you don't have rats. We're in the middle of an awful drought and, as such, we've developed a rat problem at my family's home. (They don't like the 'nothing to eat out here', so they come inside)

The best cure? A few boxes of rat bait (poison) about the place. They eat it up. They die. We find them, once the stink sets in. They're big. But we win!

Maybe you should try mouse bait instead of traps… or alphabetically-laid sunflower seeds.