Our dog ate a dead mouse. The vet bill was $480.

I refused poison after that night. Then I found out every other mouse fix had a problem too, when you have a dog that eats anything and a baby who crawls.

9pm, emergency vet. Maple was fine. I was not.

Maple will eat a sock if you let her.

So when she found a dead mouse on the garage floor in September, she did not think about it. Neither did I, until I saw the tail.

My husband had put 2 green bait blocks on a high shelf behind the recycling bins. The mouse ate the bait. Then it died on the floor. Then my dog found it before I did.

9pm at the emergency vet

Nobody could tell me if that mouse had poison in it. So it was blood work, a vitamin K shot, 3 weeks of pills, and a bill for $480.

The vet tech was kind about it. She said this is most of what they see in October.

Maple was fine. I was not.

The bait blocks went in the trash that night. I said no poison on this property, ever again. My husband did not argue.

The bait blocks, where they belonged.

Which left me with mice and no plan

Here is what nobody says out loud. When you have a dog that eats anything and a baby on the floor, every mouse fix has a problem.

The garage shelf. Cotton ball, three droppings.

The sentence that stopped me

I was in a chicken keeping group of all places. We had been talking about getting a few hens.

A woman in there wrote one line that I felt in my chest.

She would not put poison down, period. Same problem as me. And someone answered her with the thing that finally made it click.

She said we were all trying to deal with mice after they had moved in. That is the hard version of the problem.

Mice pick a place to winter in the few weeks before it gets cold. They choose by smell. They follow a route in, and once a route has been used, it smells like a route to the next one.

Everything we were doing, the traps, the poison, the park drop-off, dealt with one animal and left the route open.

And the cotton balls fail for a boring reason. The oil is gone in a day or two. The smell leaves before the mouse forgets the way in.

What she did instead

She made the route somewhere a mouse did not want to be, and she did it before the weather turned.

Not a cotton ball. A sealed pouch that lets the oil out slowly for weeks. Placed where the mice actually travel, not where she wished they would stay away from.

The pouches

That is how I ended up with a bag of Revheria pouches. 12 sealed sachets. Peppermint, cinnamon and cedarwood. No poison. Nothing that snaps.

I will be honest about why I picked them. I could not find a way for them to hurt my dog or my daughter, as long as I kept them out of reach like I would with any essential oil. The bag says exactly that, which I appreciated more than a promise would have.

$44.99 for the 12. The vet was $480.

What I did, in order

The instructions matched what the woman in the group said, which is why I trusted them.

The photo that made me pull the traps.

Nothing dramatic happened, which is the point

The first week I found one dropping by the garage door. Old or new, I could not tell.

After that, nothing. No droppings behind the bins. Nothing in the pantry. I checked twice a day for another week, then I stopped checking.

At 30 days the pouches still smelled strong at arm's length. I swapped them for fresh ones anyway. The old ones went in the shed.

The thing I did not expect

I do not scan the garage floor before I let the dog out anymore.

My daughter plays in the kitchen while I cook. There is not one thing on this property that could hurt either of them. And there are no mice in my pantry.

We bought a bag of layer feed last week. We are finally getting the hens.

If you are where I was

You have two options.

Revheria's pouches are only sold at revheria.com. They are not on Amazon and not at the farm store, so if you see them somewhere else it is not the same thing.

Questions I had