Having a mouse in your home is the worst. The thought that mice have been touching your food and belongings, the wasteful once-a-year trip to stock up on traps, the guilt of causing slow, painful deaths with toxins or dealing with messy traps and injured mice – there’s no upside. No wonder most people try to think about it as little as possible.

And yet despite humans figuring out better ways to deal with laundry, food storage, heating, dishes, entertainment and everything else in our homes, mouse control has been stuck in the 1890s – literally. The snap trap we use today first hit the market back in 1893.

Some good news: Goodnature is on the case. Our new mouse trap was designed to answer all the issues that make mouse control so deeply unpleasant and to be a viable alternative to damaging toxins and old-school traps. Of course, it’s also intertwined with our wider mission of removing harmful pests from our green spaces and urban environments.

Here’s the full story.

Our clever solution to the indoor mouse problem

Mice are tricky little creatures, so we had to build a tricky little trap. It needed to be small and sleek enough to fit into the tiny spaces mice like, quick and accurate enough to kill effectively, and appealing enough to tempt them in. For the humans involved, we wanted to create a clean user experience without stress or mess.

Solving all these issues with a single trap wasn’t exactly easy. While our A24 trap for rats and other rodents has been around for decades, the size and precision needed for mice posed new challenges.

Goodnature co-founder Craig Bond explains: “It was about taking what we learned from the A24 trap – which is really targeted, really humane, automatic, multi-kill – and applying it to mice.”

Craig and his team spent three years on the design, building a trap that’s almost the opposite of the A24 – small instead of large, electronic instead of pneumatic, even off-white instead of power-tool black and orange.

Of course, the colour is the least important part – here’s how the new design solves those niggly mouse control problems.

Eliminating the ‘ew’ factor

For lots of people, the hands-on mess involved with mouse traps is a major roadblock. That’s why we often reach for toxins first – it’s much easier to throw pellets into your roof space or put a bait station behind the fridge than it is to get up close and personal with a dead or injured mouse.

When a mouse is killed in the Goodnature trap, it’s released into a front compartment and the connected app sends a notification to your phone when you’re in Bluetooth range. Your job: tip it into the bin (you don’t even have to look). The trap auto-resets after each kill, so there’s no fiddling with metal pieces either.

It’s not only clean, but much less cruel than older traps or toxins.

"From the start, we decided we'd never put a trap out into the world until it had an A-Class Rating from NAWAC, one of the toughest animal welfare standards in the world,” says Craig. “Pests are still intelligent, incredible animals, so we never want to create any unnecessary suffering. Our mouse trap gives you an incredibly swift, clean kill, taking out both the guilt and the trauma of clean-up.”

Get proactive, not reactive

When do you trap mice in your home? If you’re like most people, you only think about it when you see signs of a mouse infestation – mouse poo, nibbled food, paper scraps and even a live sighting. Then it’s time for a trip to the pest control aisle for poisons or snap traps.

The problem: focusing on a single mouse is a mistake, because there’s never just one. Mice are incredibly quick breeders. With a gestation period of just 21 days and litters of 5-6, a single female mouse can produce 50-60 babies every year. It’s easy (if not entirely pleasant) to imagine how a mouse or two can turn into an infestation in no time.

The Goodnature Mouse Trap is made for continuous use - it’s made to kill the mouse you’ve seen and the ones that haven’t been on your radar. Then, left to its own devices, it stays on guard 24/7 to catch and kill any others that try to move in.

The trap itself lasts for years instead of just a few months, while the rechargeable battery lasts for up to six months or 100 kills on one charge, with a long-life peanut butter lure to keep mice coming in. Even better, the connected app lets you know when the trap catches a mouse or needs to be recharged. It’s always on the lookout for mice, so you don’t have to be.

It’s all tried and tested, too. Craig recalls setting a trap on a test rig during the development process and firing a mechanical mouse into it to test its durability.

“It went on for days and days and days. 20,000 strikes, no issues, no wear, no mechanical damage,” he says. “20,000 dead plastic mice."

As humane as possible

If you have to kill a living thing, you want to do it in the quickest, most humane way you can. Snap traps can’t target a mouse with much precision, which leads to suffering for the mouse and a messy clean-up for the human. Toxins are even worse – most of the poisons on the market cause internal bleeding and a long, slow death over several days.

That’s why getting the targeting and strike mechanism right was so important for our trap. Craig and his team spent more than a year designing and refining the sensors and striker inside the trap, making sure it could target and hit a tiny, fast-moving animal accurately. And we do mean tiny.

“The target location to humanely kill a mouse is a circle about 5mm in diameter,” says Craig. “We need to strike that every time, and we do. As the mouse enters the trap, the first sensor wakes the system up, then the second sensor targets perfectly so it strikes the animal in the perfect spot to kill it humanely and instantly.”

That swift, accurate kill isn’t just better for the mouse – it means a clean, mess-free experience for you.

The mouse/garden connection

Nobody wants a mouse in their house – but mouse control goes beyond the annoyance of scuttling in the walls or nibbled crackers in the pantry. Despite seeming small and relatively harmless, the mice in our homes – and the toxins we use to deal with them – have a knock-on effect on our environment.

Mice in your house migrate out to your garden in summer, eating grass seeds, fruit and berries from native trees, weta, worms and other invertebrates, and even the occasional bird’s egg or skink. One study found about half as many ground-dwelling invertebrates in areas with mice, while another found that mice ate birds’ eggs from nests up to 11 metres off the ground. Mice have been observed eating native lizards – in fact, one study of mice on an isolated island found that up to 20% of their diet was made up of skinks – and even eating live chicks much larger than themselves.

This has a ripple effect on biodiversity in these environments, with fewer seeds and fruit meaning less food for birds, fewer bugs and worms impacting the soil, and potentially, reduced growth of plants and trees when seeds are eaten. Mice in gardens can also spread out to our native bush, where they cause similar issues.

The trouble with toxins

Like mice themselves, we know that toxins used to control them also have wide-ranging impacts on biodiversity and urban ecosystems. Birds like New Zealand’s native birds of prey - kārearea and ruru - which eat mice and rats, may be at risk of secondary poisoning if they eat a poisoned rodent. One Australian study found there that birds of prey are particularly vulnerable because most of their diet is made up of rats and mice, which means toxins build up in their system over time, causing organ damage and other health issues. In one survey, 73% of Southern Boobook owls found dead had rodenticides in their system. There’s evidence that in New Zealand weta and other invertebrates feed on toxin pellets, which means insectivorous birds and the pekapeka (native bat) could end up ingesting poison through their diet.

Of course, toxins are also risky to use around kids or pets. We know that you don’t really want to use poison in your home, but haven’t had great alternatives – our mouse trap fills that gap.

Bringing mouse control into the modern world

Why are we taking on indoor mice after working on bush blocks and farms for so many years? Well, as Craig puts it, filling the mouse in your house-sized gap in our trapping systems just made sense.

“We’ve seen the difference our traps have made in forests, farms and backyards around the world” he says. “Taking a bit of Goodnature trapping smarts into people’s homes was a natural next step - and removing mice from urban ecosystems helps move our wider mission forward as well.”

We knew there were millions of people out there with mice in their homes and no good way of managing them. And we do mean millions – one survey found that 82% of homes tested positive for mouse allergens, suggesting a current infestation or recent mouse activity.

We set out to make a trap that would resolve all the nasty parts of mouse control – a mess-free, guilt-free, fuss-free alternative to the limited options out there. With super-precise, humane targeting, automated resetting, app updates and a clean, mess-free user experience, the Goodnature Mouse Trap is a real, long-lasting alternative to archaic traps and damaging toxins.

Of course, the trap also contributes to our rewilding mission by helping homeowners and environmental groups remove mice from the environment, without adding toxins at the same time.

We think of it as 125 years of mouse trap progress packed into a tiny, triangular package.

Ready to change the way you think about mouse control? Get your Goodnature Mouse Trap now.