But I also learned how to place the traps so that hasn't happened since.  The opening has to be right at the place the mice come into the house so it's the first thing they see/smell.

Glue traps should be flat-out banned, I think.  The farmers around here use them extensively because they simply don't have time to keep going around and checking all the traps, disposing of the corpses and resetting them.  But it's a horrible thing to do to any creature.  I don't even like doing it to flies.

My 6-yo neutered male cat is the champeen mouser of my household.  Since I live in the country, all three cats go out, and I see Marco three or four times a day racing back toward the house from the weedy places with his prize, which he more often than not drops at the feet of my 2-yo, less adventurous neutered female, and she prances around with it joyfully as if she'd caught it herself.

I DO NOT let the cats come and go precisely because of the mouse corpse, or wounded mouse, problem.  I demand to see if they're carrying before I let them in for the night.  I still occasionally find headless corpses on my bedroom rug in the morning, or corpse-less heads, from the inside mice they catch.

Then, after looking over our location, our credit rating, and more, our banker (for other accounts; we're moving our mortgage from another that was bought by a big national outfit so started cutting service while adding fees) offered us an even lower rate -- one that I could not have imagined, as it is about a third of the rate for my first mortgage a few decades ago.

So we locked in and now look forward to finding out just what the appraisal will be, with all the stories of declining value.  If ours declined below the city assessment, I'll have that ammo to appeal that and lower our property taxes, too.

It was the terror of this that caused me--someone who had made it to 45 with no surgeries and was averse to having one I might not need--to race to the surgeon.