Mice like Milk Chocolate

A client that lives in a local apartment complex stated that the entire building was infested with mice, so he bought some traps to catch any that get into his apartment. The instructions on the box of snap traps recommend baiting the traps with peanut butter or chocolate. But what kind of chocolate, it appears that little is known if mice like plain, white, dark or milk chocolate. It has been shown that mice and rats are attracted to sweet foods, but how sweet. Mice feed mainly at night, making hundreds of visits to food sources per night, consuming up to 5 gm each time. A test was set-up to see which chocolate the mice would eat if they had a choice. So the results were not that shocking, the higher sugar content chocolates i.e. milk chocolate (56% sugar) was the most preferred next to white chocolate (53% sugar). The lonely dark chocolate sat untouched at 15% sugar. Also milk chocolate has the least amount of cocoa solids. Cocoa contains a bitter compound called theobromine. As the sugar content goes down and the cocoa content goes up in the darker chocolates there is more theobromine, which makes it taste bitterer. Mice obviously don’t like the bitter taste. Theobromine is also poisonous to some mammals, especially dogs and cats. Mice and other rodents are more tolerant of theobromine, but the mice maybe also trying to avoiding the chocolate with higher theobromine content.

gogreenpestcontrol.ca Ladner Tsawwassen Delta B.C. Randy Bilesky

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mice-like-milk-chocolate-randy-bilesky/?published=t

http://www.delta-optimist.com/opinion/blogs/blog-mice-like-milk-chocolate-1.23060597