Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

About 15 years ago, our apartment building began having occassional mouse problems, with my own apartment receiving 2 or 3 visits from a stray little fellow each year. I was truly appalled to see some of the more modern solutions in the stores -- I'd always had a problem with the idea of the traditional spring traps and poisons, but the houses containing sticky-bottomed floors seemed unduly cruel. I don't want to kill the little SOBs, let alone torture them; I just don't want them as roommates. The Havahart live trap is a good, humane, cost effective solution to it all. The mechanism is a simple bait-table connected to a set of two thick and sturdy exterior wires which -- on a new trap -- trips very easily (a bit of delicate, deft handling of the exterior wires is needed to get the trap to not spring closed during setup -- those with large fingers will have a difficult time with it I would think). Following capture and release, a good cleaning in a bucket of bleach, well rinsed, and the trap is ready to go again. For the more romatically inclined, there's a good feeling to be had in preparing a Wine & Cheese Platter (actually, I use toilet tissue and peanut butter) in my attempts to be a good host to the occasional visit from Mr. Mouse. The trap works well enough that normally I see no evidence of a mouse in my kitchen prior to him appearing in the trap -- over the years, I've come to regard the visitors less as disease-ridden destructive vermin, and more as a cute if unkempt old friend who gives me a good excuse to swab the kitchen in bleach. I normally replace traps every five or six years, and not because they break or become non-functional-- Over time, the trap tends to get a funky dark tarnished patina which is simply too unattractive to my eye. With reasonable care, these traps can be a one-time purchase which need no replacement. Aesthetic loss aside, after a year or so of use, it helps to oil the moving parts of the trap -- without this, it's possible for the mouse to enter the trap, steal the bait, and leave without tripping the mechanism. Be careful also of too heavy-handed handling of the trap when cleaning -- although sturdy enough, the walls of the cage can be bent with a bit of pressure, which will prevent easy movement of the doors and bait-table. This is, to my mind, one of those superior products which one always returns to. Whoever crafted the phrase "build a better mousetrap" never saw one of these. It's cheap, it's permanent, it works. UPDATE: 10/13/11 Many of the reviews for this product justifiably criticise the hair-trigger action of this trap, and the difficulty in setting it up without having it spring. Since I wrote this review, my workaround for the problem has been to wrap a small swatch of transparent scotch tape around either of the external trip-wires (connecting to either the bait table, or to the bent wire leading to the door). The objective is to make one of the two thin trip-wires slightly thicker so the they can balance more comfortably on each other. I generally don't need to continue this after the trap has some use/cleaning/light banging around or is otherwise not new from the box. Hope this helps.