# Mice Chewing the Bale Strings



## Haymike56 (May 3, 2010)

Has anyone figured out how to keep the mice from chewing the strings on stored hay? The past two years those little buggers have gotten in to my second and third cutting hay and by this time of year they have created a mess. I have to basicly move each bale by hand and retie the broken ones. If I try to move them with the grapple the broken ones fall apart. I am using New Holland plastic twine which is supposed to rodent resistant but the better the hay, the more they burrow in and chew the strings. Is there a some product out there that will prevent this??


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

Haymike56 said:


> Has anyone figured out how to keep the mice from chewing the strings on stored hay? The past two years those little buggers have gotten in to my second and third cutting hay and by this time of year they have created a mess. I have to basicly move each bale by hand and retie the broken ones. If I try to move them with the grapple the broken ones fall apart. I am using New Holland plastic twine which is supposed to rodent resistant but the better the hay, the more they burrow in and chew the strings. Is there a some product out there that will prevent this??


Barncatus americanus?


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## Blue Duck (Jun 4, 2009)

I agree with mlappin hungry cats work reasonable well.

I had an old timer tell me to urinate on the twine before I put it in the baler. I think he just wanted to see if I would actually do it.....(it didn't work)LOL


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## sedurbin (May 30, 2009)

If the strings are on the sides I have very few problems.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

We used to have an Australian Shepard that was hell on anything that would even attempt to fight back. Possums, muskrats, groundhogs, raccoons and unfortunately cats were an endangered species around the farm with her on the prowl. When we didn't have any cats around we couldn't buy rat/mouse bait pails fast enough. Once I finally broke her of killing cats and the average life span of a cat on the farm increased drastically from five minutes, the rat and mouse problem quickly wasn't. After we started having 5-10 cats around the farm at all times, would only go thru a couple of pails of rat bait a year.

Get some cats around and _don't_ let the wife feed em to much if at all. We'll usually give em just enough dog food so they don't go looking for greener pastures.


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## hay wilson in TX (Jan 28, 2009)

For that very reason.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

hay wilson in TX said:


> For that very reason.


Absolutely no one uses wire tie here. TBH I've never even seen a wire tie bale in person.


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## Haymike56 (May 3, 2010)

Well I don't have an Australian Shepard but we do have plenty of coyotes and they seem to have developed an appetite for cats so we have a hard time keeping them around. With all the houses around its hard shoot the varmints. I guess I'll have to experiment, thought maybe spreading Moth balls around on the ground prior to setting the pallets down. My wife said maybe I could try and find a way to run the twine through a chillie pepper solution as I am baling. Hell this could be my ticket to fame and fortune!!


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## Dolphin (May 21, 2010)

Don't have any cats. Wouldn't they shit on the stack?


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

Not really, no worse than the ***** do if they do.


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## vhaby (Dec 30, 2009)

For those of you who don't have cats frequenting your stacked hay, they cannot scratch holes in the hay to do their thing in and then cover up the hole. They do this on the ground. I have several cats and have not seen any cat scat on the hay bales.


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## Dolphin (May 21, 2010)

Thanks, local shelter always has cats, might try find one that's been spayed but not been declawed and save it from being put down, put her to work.

Spayed female or neutered male work better by any chance?


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## haybaler101 (Nov 30, 2008)

Neither will work, spay or neuter a cat and they will just get fat and lazy. You got have the wild-ass cats that had in the shadows to do a good job, otherwise, they will just hang around the house and wait on you to feed them.


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## Toyes Hill Angus (Dec 21, 2010)

wild and female. I got a tom that save some of his water for the mice to have. Makes for a lot of cats in no time but, they don't live long here.


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## hay wilson in TX (Jan 28, 2009)

I really like those glossy black snakes. Never mistake one of them for a rattler. 
This time of the year the snakes go up to the lodge hall parking lot to get some heat in their old bones. If I see one I stop and park next to it so the wild eyed kids ( Children of all ages love to kill snakes! ) do not try to run over them and kill the snakes.

We have a lodge hall on our road, right opposite my hay barn. It is the lodge hall's parking lot that the snakes like to use for heat. 
If the teen agers think there are snakes in my barn they do not slip over and use have a premature honeymoon on the stacked hay.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

haybaler101 said:


> Neither will work, spay or neuter a cat and they will just get fat and lazy. You got have the wild-ass cats that had in the shadows to do a good job, otherwise, they will just hang around the house and wait on you to feed them.


LOL, I always heard otherwise, spay or neuter them and they have nothing better to do ;-) The most mouse killing cat I ever seen was fixed, real shame to as I wished we would have had some kittens out of her. She'd kill em and leave em lay, most likely only ate a a few out of every ten.


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## rjmoses (Apr 4, 2010)

We have a rule of thumb here: Four cats, neutered, get fed 1 cup of cat food twice a day UNLESS I see a mouse, then no food for 1-2 days. No mice. Those shiny black things on the ground--we don't kill them, but they are not allowed inside. No mice in the barn = no snakes in the barn.

Ralph


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## Mike120 (May 4, 2009)

I've got at least a half dozen cats down at the barn and a few more by the house. All have been shifted into neutral. I pretty much follow Ralph's rule on feeding them. No mice and, as a result, no snakes either.....and I like rat snakes. We've got a lot of coyotes but we've never lost a cat. They are either too fast or smart. My theory is that the coyotes are feasting on all the house pets that the fine folks from the city abandon out here.


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## Hoosier Hay Farms (Aug 17, 2009)

hay wilson in TX said:


> For that very reason.


Have not seen a wire tie baler since the 70's here. An old International, forget the model. Besides the mice problem...we always had baling wire to hold everything from mufflers to gates up. Miss the old wire balers. By the way, there always seems to be alot of cats around here and they do a bang-up job.


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## haybaler101 (Nov 30, 2008)

Still run a NH 570 wire tie, bought new in 1988. In our area, if wasn't wire tie, you didn't use it.


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## hay king (Feb 6, 2011)

Fixed barn cats are lazey kind of like house cats. If you go to a shelter get the cat that has a crazey look in his eye like its insane thats a good place to start LOL. we have several barn cats. They dont crap on the hay and they keep the mice away we do feed them some but not to much they have to be a bit hungry to get them to hunt. your best bet is to get a male and a female and let them do there thing you find your numbers go up then down as they move around or get eaten but that way you should at least have a new litter if they get eaten and you wont run out of cats.
good luck and start stacking bales on their side if you can as that also keep the mice away form the strings


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## Grateful11 (Apr 5, 2009)

Wife was moving the last 4 bales out of one shed today and our dog, he's pretty big 92lbs, had so many mice in his mouth at one time he lost a couple. He's a natural born mouse killer, he just kills them eat won't eat them. The 17lbs cat just sat there and watched, too lazy to even try. She hasn't had much trouble with mice chewing the twine on the bales. She uses a small diameter plastic, it's orange, can't think of the name of it.


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## tnwalkingred (Jun 8, 2010)

This is a little off topic but one thing I want to warn you guys about is the importance of keeping possums out of your hay barn! Possums carry a disease called EPM or better known as "Possums disease". It basically a parasite that they are a carrier for as it does not harm the possum. However if they defecate on your hay/water the parasite can get transferred into a horses body and will KILL it if left untreated. I personally had to shoot the best looking stud colt I have ever owned due to this disease. I have known at least ten other people who have shared the same fate. Since then I have killed every single possum I have seen either around the farm or on the road! My new mud tires on my truck have already claimed at least five of these dudes. LOL.

Kyle

"EPM (Equine Protozoal Encephalytis) is a neurological disease seen in horses that is caused by ingestion of the infective sporocysts of Sarcocystis neurona. These sporocysts are shed in the feces of oppossums that have ingested meat with the parasite encysted in in (dead cats, skunks, birds, etc). Once these infective sporocysts are ingested by horses who eat feedstuffs of drink water contaminated by possum feces, the immune system normally kills the protozoan parasite but in a very small number of horses (less than 1% of exposed horses) the parasite makes it's way into the central nervous system and begins to reproduce. In doing so, it destroys cells in the central nervous system and causes inflammation in the central nervous system. Both the cellular destruction and the inflammatoin serve to disrupt the normal flow of nervous impulses along the central nervous system and lead to neurological deficits such as lack of coordination and balance, loss of muscle control, etc."


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## Rodney R (Jun 11, 2008)

If you can keep cats that eat mice around, that works the best. Most of the cats here get fed too much by other folks, or get killed on the road. We buy a couple pails or mouse bait and that seems to help a little. Stacking bales on their side does NOT help - I bet that I've fixed 30-40 bales this year an all of them were stacked on edge. The mice will go up between the bales, and nibble on the strings as they move north. If a guy stacks them flat, then there is simply too much weight for the mice to go sideways very much, and they might give up by the time they get to the strings.

Rodney


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## Dolphin (May 21, 2010)

I have a small flock of laying hens and a couple roosters. I'd like to get a cat to take care of the mice around here, but I don't want to risk the chickens being targeted. Would a cat attack or kill a chicken?


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## Mike120 (May 4, 2009)

Dolphin said:


> I have a small flock of laying hens and a couple roosters. I'd like to get a cat to take care of the mice around here, but I don't want to risk the chickens being targeted. Would a cat attack or kill a chicken?


We have a small flock of barn cats and three chickens that think they own the place. The cats steer chear of them and we've never had any problems.


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## Nitram (Apr 2, 2011)

I also have free ranging chickens the bard rock roster made " friends" with the two cats so now there is no conflict.


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## Dolphin (May 21, 2010)

LOL l


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## Dolphin (May 21, 2010)

I talked to an animal control officer in a nearby town today. He's trapping feral cats on Thursday, asked me how many I wanted. He'll bring them to a vet to get a rabies shot, spay or neuter and drop them off Friday, no charge for anything. I asked "what if they run off?" and he said "I'll just bring you some more." LOL

Coyotes would make a snack out of them in no time out here if they stray too far.

I think I made a good connection with one hand washing the other so to speak. Saw a big fat mouse in a shed today and the fields are full of them, they'll eat good here if they can hunt and I won't have to buy anymore poison.

The dogs are going to be busy watching the new arrivals and the roosters are going to have some "explaining" to do.


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## K WEST FARMS (Apr 4, 2011)

I always end up baling a large amount of oat straw. Last year because of almost continous rain, had to cut some oats with the haybine just to salvage the straw. By the time you rake it around and bale it, a lot of the oats shakes out but a lot ends up in the straw bales. When piling bales in the barn, I pick up some bar bait for rats and mice and every time a layer is complete, I break up the bars in to many small pieces and throw them over the layer, put on another layer, throw the bait again, etc. This has always worked in the past. So far this year, one broken bale out of about 300 loaded out. So I think it is working again!!! John


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## Toyes Hill Angus (Dec 21, 2010)

K West, do you not worry about what ever animals you are bedding with this straw eating the bait, especially if there is grain in the straw? I know it would take quite a bit of it to hurt a cow much but I was always afraid of one of the cows getting sick or worse, but I have found very few broken bales with plastic twine.


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## K WEST FARMS (Apr 4, 2011)

Toyes Hill : I have never had a problem, knock on wood!! When I break the bait up, Iend up with small crumbles and I think they mostly just roll off the bales when I load or fall to ground or into exsisting bedding when bales are broken. I do use plastic twine and before I tried the bait thing, a few years ago I lost about 150 bales in a stack of 400 ! What a mess!!! I ended up giving to an Amish farmer and it took him 6 weeks to clean out the barn. But no problems since using the bait. Have a good one ! John


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## Nitram (Apr 2, 2011)

Bad news the Bard rock roster tried to make friends with a FOX/COYOTE/**** and was unable :-{ lost 4 hens and the only ones left are the Bantams. they said Flying is good strategy


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## Dolphin (May 21, 2010)

Update; have received 4 cats from the local animal control officer to date. One got hit by a car, the other three are still on the job. Mice problem is way down, for a while every day there were "offerings" place at the door for us to find in the morning. A baby mouse, a bird head, a half eaten meaty thing, a big fat mouse paralyzed on one side making circling escape attempts etc...

Chickens and other animals have adjusted, dogs are fascinated and get an occasional meaty treat provided by the cats, all around it was a good thing. I see them out patrolling all night. We have a couple litter boxes they use sometimes, but they use the great outdoors a lot. Wife wants to feed them more cat food than I, the oldest and first one we received has gotten too fat and lazy to go under the gates. I guess she'll be the heater for the other two when they get back from the hunt. They have it pretty good but they earn their keep and we don't buy d-con anymore.


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## urednecku (Oct 18, 2010)

Good to hear that!


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