On May 13, 2018, at 1:20 PM, DCHAS Membership Chair <membership**At_Symbol_Here**DCHAS.ORG> wrote:

From: Monona Rossol <actsnyc**At_Symbol_Here**cs.com>
Re; mouse bait anyone?

please post new cry for help

I love my apartment.  I've lived here since 1969.  Every fall, for almost 50 years, a few mice come in, we poison and trap them, and in less than a week we are back to normal.  I moved to NYC from living in my farm house/studio in Wisconsin where the procedure was, and still is, the same.  The mice come in when its fall, you do them all in, and settle down for the winter.

Well, that's not what happened last year. We killed a few, but not one particular mouse.

We are in a six-floor walk-up and this is one of the mice that run on the moldings on the outside of NYC buildings and come in over the sills of open windows (I see them come in each year).  The mouse is still here this spring because it lives on D-Con (eats a ~1/4 cube per day), Just-One-Bite (eats about a teaspoon full per night off those big yellow poison bars), the roots of my plants, and a couple of bird seeds that I miss when I clean up the feeder every night. Our apartment is festooned with bait traps, snap traps, electronic traps, and sticky traps.  

I even tried a few home made concoctions.  But the mouse associates peanut butter and cheese with snap traps, and won't go near any concoctions.  She prefers the commercial poisons.  Sometimes she eats so much poison that her little poopies are bright D-Con green.

I KNOW it's a SHE because, in these miserable 8 months, she has TWICE raised a litter to the point that they can leave where ever she is nesting.  The wee mice tear up the whole house for a day and all die from the poisons or in the traps.  If one of her offspring inherits both the poison immunity and her smarts, we are going to be in BIG trouble.

The building's regular licensed exterminator only offers snap traps and D-Con.  And I can't do integrated pest management in a 150 year old tenement whose walls and floors leak like sieves. Without open windows we'd have no fresh air.  Some of my plants have lived with us 30 years and I'm not getting rid of them (although I forgot to move one of the plants into the bathtub last night and she ate so much of the roots it will probably die).  And I clean up the bird seed from the feeder every night but I'm not giving up birds.

I'm just not giving up 50-year, happy, fulfilling life style for one damn mouse.  Instead: I NEED SOMETHING THAT WORKS.   I am willing to entertain just about any ideas.


Monona Rossol, M.S., M.F.A., Industrial Hygienist
President:  Arts, Crafts & Theater Safety, Inc.
Safety Officer: Local USA829, IATSE
181 Thompson St., #23
New York, NY 10012     212-777-0062
actsnyc**At_Symbol_Here**cs.com   www.artscraftstheatersafety.org

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