On Sun, 21 Dec 2008 17:50:22 -0500, trader-of-some-jacks
wrote:

As seems to be the case most winters, we have mouse droppings starting
to pop up (or is it plop down?) in our basement.

Some judicious mouse trap use always stops the problem. But I'm
getting old and tired of the "standard" traps - baiting them, making
sure to not set them off myself, emptying the gross dead mice from
them, repeating...

(By "standard" I'm talking about the kind seen in Looney Tunes and
other cartoons - bait with cheese or peanut butter, and a piece of
metal snaps onto the mouse and kills it.)

What's a "better" mouse trap? By that I mean one that might kill
multiple mice without rebaiting, and that's easy to clean and reuse.

Not so fond of the bait traps that feed them poisoned food, as they
force me to figure out where the dead critters are. I'd rather
confine my looking for carcass hunting to where the trap(s) are.

A 5 gallon steel pail 1/2 full of water, with aramp up to the top
and a stich across the top - with the bait on a metal wheel off the
side. When the mouse goes for the bait, the slick wheel turns and
dumps him into the water. He might swim for a while but he won't last
long.