Um, if they take the bait and then die somewhere inaccessible you'll have to put up with the smell while they decay. If you can't cover everywhere they might be, and/or can't access the places where the blighters might go to die, I'd stick with putting traps in the areas you can access and view it as a long-term war of attrition until Project Tiddles comes online.

Best approach depends on your house design. How well-ventilated it is and such. Bait worked badly for us (at my orkplace) because the mice died in inaccessible places and smelt. Plainly pen didn't get that problem, but we did.

Neither poison nor traps will ever get them all, of course; making sure they can't get to any of your food is the most reliable way to make them lose interest.

Well, just about everyone in Edinburgh has mice. The majority of the buildings are 3 or 4 storey tenement flats constructed around 1900. Chances are the blighters moved in during building and have been endemic ever since. I'm also sure they can get between buildings if they try hard enough so if you were going for the total obliteration approach, as pen suggests, it might not be enough to restrict it to just one block.

I work on the principle that since they have access to a range of habitats we need to make ours as inhospitable as possible. Unfortunately, the age of the joinery is such that there's gaps and holes everywhere so getting these all mouse-proofed would probably cost more than moving to somewhere that's in a better state from this point of view. On the plus side, the number of poos I've found has been pretty small, which is suggestive we're not getting more than a few visitors. But if we catch more than four or five it'll probably be time to have a chat to the council to see if they have any wholesale slaughter solutions.

I dealt with my infestation during spring. The smell lasted about a week, after which I got two hatches of bluebottles every day for a week or so. I used elementary biology to interpret what had happened to the cadavers.

I got infested once (well, my garage then basement then house did). I tried humane traps to no avail (They came back faster than I could transport them to another place). I tried spring traps to no avail (they proved expert at getting the bait without suffering a crushed skull). Then I reluctantly put down glue traps (which require one to figure out a humane way of ending it for the trrapped animal). When I caught and euthanised my eleventh or twelfth mouse I gave up and called in the pros, who put down some sort of poison with the singular property of making the doomed mouse very thirsty. I was advised to check the bath before showering each morning. That did the trick eventually. I imagine they died in the crawl spaces, but I didn't notice any smell. Perhaps the corpses mummified and now await discovery (whereupon they will doubtless put a curse on their discoverer). I don't think I'd waste time with traps if it happened again.

[SM] That sounds very similar to the situation at my old flat; I tried traps and poisons, none of which worked. But then Dave came round and dispensed the hard stuff, and never a squeak after. But that was a modern flat, and filling the holes with expanding foam was straightforward. After our first visitation we called Dave in straight away, and it took him three attempts to get rid of the first batch; and expressed doubts that given the way the plumbing had been done in the kitchen that he could offer anything like a permanent solution.