My friend Ralph is travelung to Ghana. His friend thwre asked him to bring mice traps from the US with him. Are they effecrive therr? Are there good techniques for mouse control ?
It’s hard for me to believe that mouse traps are not available locally in that they are available in the many countries I have worked in.
However, even if they are available, I would not consider buying them because they are too easy to make and the ones you make are much better.
We make our own and whereas a store-bought mousetrap only catches one mouse until it is reset. Our mouse traps will catch 10 or 20. We try to catch a lot of mice to use as free chicken food.
It’s a bit difficult to explain, and maybe later in the week, I can take some pictures and post them. But they are made out of 5 gallon buckets. About 3 inches of water is added to the bucket. The mice fall into the bucket and drown. The next morning, we scoop them out and give them to the chickens.
We get a piece of stiff wire, like coat hanger wire. We drill two holes near the top edge of the bucket, so the stiff wire forms an “axle” that goes through a beer can or a soda can. A small dab of peanut butter goes on the can. A small piece of board makes a ramp up to the edge of the bucket. When the mouse jumps on the can to get the peanut butter, the cans spins, and he falls into the water.
An alternative approach is to buy small plastic trash cans that have “flip tops”. They work exactly the same way. When the mouse walks out on the fliptop, the top flips, and he falls into the water.
If you have other animals, like chickens or dogs and cats, who would like to get to the bait, we build a cage made with chicken wire. It covers the bucket. Mice can climb through the wire, but the dogs and cats and chickens can’t.
Blessings!
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Thank you for sharing this technique!
I think it is a good thing whenever we can turn a problem into a benefit. Maybe your friend can turn the problem of mice into the benefit of free chicken food.
As you may know, chickens are omnivores that eat worms and bugs, mice, small snakes, etc.
We have a mouse problem out in our fields because the mice like to chew on our irrigation plastic tubing creating a big problem. So we are turning that problem into chicken food.
The normal farm solution where we are, is to put out a lot of mouse poison. That cost money and has the potential to poison other animals. Plus, it misses the opportunity to make the chickens happy.
Mice make pigs happy too!
I love these ingenious ideas to use a problem for a benefit!
I will remember this when we go to Sierra Leone in February!
And of course the long term solution to mice is building a diverse ecosystem where mice population will balance out by itself… 
We do have mice on our farm, but we also have cats, dogs, chicken, mongoose, civet cats, genets, kites, owls, herons, snakes, monitor lizards etc. So there are years with more mice, but normally they don’t bother us, and we don’t need to do a thing about them.
This is the way to do it!
Here are some descriptions of rat/mice control on ECHOcommunity.