HeyBub wrote:
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.

Let's see... you want:

1. No or minimal baiting.
2. Automatic resetting.
3. Deals with multiple rodents.
4. Easy to reuse.
5. Self cleaning.

Think cat.

You can even borrow one.

Look up "Towser," a cat who, for 23 years, was the "Mouser-In-Chief" at the
Glennturrent Distillery in Scotland. During her career she dispatched 23,898
mice (plus a few rats and an occasional rabbit).

Enshrined in the Guiness Book of Records, Towser averaged about three mice
per day during her service.

As an aside, if I were Towser's supervisor, and she was brining me three
mice a day, I'd have hired a mouser-trainee to assist in the project.