Don't Put Baking Soda Out For Mice Do This Instead

There is a mix going around this autumn. Baking soda and cornbread, two parts to one, syrup stirred in for mice and bacon grease for rats. Four million people have watched it made on camera this year, and it costs about two dollars. I want to tell you what is actually in that bowl, because it is not nothing. It is the best bait in the whole video. It just is not the poison. Here is the part that matters, and it is not the reason you will read online. You will see people say a rat would have to eat its own body weight in baking soda. That is simply wrong, and the arithmetic does not support it. The real problem is that the gas has nowhere to build. It goes down and out, it is absorbed into the blood and breathed off, and the fizzing stops when the stomach acid runs out. The EPA has sodium bicarbonate registered as a fungicide, for turf and flowers. It is not even on the minimum risk list, and table salt is on that list. And this is the piece that should stop you. A rodent tries new food in a small amount first and then waits, because it cannot be sick. So a dose that makes it feel poorly without finishing it teaches that animal, permanently, to avoid the food and anything that smells like it. You do not end up with a dead mouse. You end up with a mouse that will not take bait, and now the thing that would have worked does not. Five things in this film. The first one costs you a pencil. The second is the one nobody mentions and it is why your traps are empty: rats will wait two weeks before approaching a new object, and mice will not wait at all. They are opposites, so the fix is opposite. There is also one question to ask before you buy any poison, and almost nobody asks it. Is there an antidote? And in October, bait your traps with cotton wool instead of peanut butter. She is not hungry right now. She is building. I was never a trapper. I was head custodian at one public school for forty years, with a hayfield running up to the back wall and no line in the budget for rodents, so I learned what works by running out of money. #HomeMaintenance #MiceControl #PestControl