Is it true that you should wear gloves when setting mouse traps? (Or the mice will smell you on the traps and therefore, avoid them?)—Wilhelmina Joseph, via email
It’s at least half true. “Wearing gloves is important for hygiene reasons,” says Nate Robertson of Robertson Wildlife and Pest Control in Coldwater, Ont. Rodents carry disease. And if you’re reusing snap traps, your fingers could be getting up close and personal with their bodily fluids.
Okay, but is the scent from your naked fingers powerful enough to deter a mouse from approaching a trap? No expert that we asked thought so.
When it comes to wearing gloves versus not when setting traps, “I’ve never really noticed a difference either way,” says Lauralee Proudfoot, the co-owner of Cottage Country Pest Control in Victoria Harbour, Ont. “Mice certainly don’t seem to care or be at all aversive to human scents.” That tracks: if our scent was so terrifying to them, wouldn’t they avoid eating the food that we’ve touched? Wouldn’t they refrain from, say, crawling through our hair while we’re in bed, trying to sleep? (That’s a true anecdote. But, you know, from a friend.)
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Mice do have an excellent sense of smell. They possess about 12,000 kinds of odour receptors (humans, on the other hand, have a measly 350), and they’re very good at detecting the presence of predators—research suggests that they have the ability to sniff out a specific compound found in mammal urine. But we assume that you’re not peeing on your traps. And that you’re baiting them with food.
“It’s unlikely human scent alone would be a deterrent for catching rodents,” says Tom Sullivan, a mammal ecologist and a professor emeritus at UBC. “This would be particularly so in the presence of peanut butter.” Or another tasty bait with a powerful scent.
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We’re not the Glove Police. Wear gloves or don’t. But if you’re asking this question because your mouse-trapping efforts are failing, you might be using the wrong bait. Or the wrong traps.
“In my experience, effectiveness is more about what mice have experienced already,” says Proudfoot. “A couple of near-misses in a particular type of snap trap will result in rodents giving those a wide berth. At which point, just switch to a different type and start again.”
Got a question for Cottage Q&A? Send it to answers@cottagelife.com.
This article was originally published in the March/April 2025 issue of Cottage Life.
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