Date Posted: December 15, 2016
Category: Mice And Rodents
Sparkling Christmas lights all around town, bells jingling when toy store doors are opened, and smiling shoppers rushing home with their treasures! Ahh, it's the holiday season again. It is a time for helping out at the local soup kitchen, a time for helping out a family in need, and a time for letting rodents into your nice, warm home for the cold winter months. Wait a minute! You may believe in the holiday spirit and in giving until it hurts, but letting mice into your home for the winter can, literally, hurt in more ways than one.
Why mice in your home is a bad idea:
Mice chew. And chew and chew and chew. Like all rodents, mice have a set of incisors that never stop growing. They have to continuously chew on things so those teeth don't grow too long. Some of their favorite things to chew on are wood, insulation, plastic, items stored in your attic, sheetrock, electrical wires, and more. It's also worth noting, if a mouse or other invading animal chews on wiring, it could result in a house fire.
Mice leave excrement everywhere they go. If you are finding tiny, dark, rice-shaped droppings in the backs of your kitchen drawers, inside cabinets, along your baseboards, or other places, this is a sign of mice in your home. Not only do these droppings potentially spread disease and illness, but mice can also spread bacteria and filth with their feet and fur--filth that they picked up when they were foraging in garbage heaps, sewers, trash cans, and the like.
Mice can bring parasites into your home. If a mouse doesn't leave any illness spreading pathogens directly, they may pose a threat by bringing parasites into your home - parasites such as lice, mites, fleas and even ticks and all the diseases that they carry and transmit.
Mice can cause loss of sleep. If you have mice living within your walls and attic spaces, their rustling, gnawing, scritch-scratching noises have the potential of keeping you awake at night. And, if they get quiet, the thought of, "Where are they now?" is enough to keep most people awake.
Mice multiply quickly. A single female mouse has the potential to produce as many as 5 litters a year, with an average of 14 babies in each litter. That's a lot of baby mice! And considering that about half of those babies will be female and will quickly take to producing their own litters… Well, you get the point.
If you suspect you might have mice in your Rhode Island home this holiday season, don't take risks with your home or your family. The pest professionals here at Big Blue Bug Solutions are standing by to help. So maybe this is "the season for giving," but perhaps, when it comes to dirty little rodents, "Tis the season for giving them the boot." Have a holly jolly, rodent-free holiday with Big Blue Bug.
