Mice in my oaten hay!

Question
QUESTION: I was wondering if you would have any idea what to do about mice in my oaten hay? I buy it by the bale for my bunnies and keep it in the garden shed and recently mice have found it and I've run into them a few times when out there getting hay. I have nothing against mice but it worries me that them being there could somehow be harmful to my bunnies. I can't have the hay inside though because there's no room anywhere but in my room with the bunnies and if I kept it there they'd most likely pee all over it (they've done so in the past). And I'm not willing to use mouse traps, I couldn't kill mice. And of course humane trapping would be absolutely useless. So yeah anything I can do and do you know if mouses touching my buns hay could harm them in any way?

ANSWER: Hi,

well your options are limited.  Personally I wouldn't use hay mice had gotten into because you know they are vectors for diseases and have no idea how deep the contamination can go or last.

Wild mice will have more harmful diseases (from the wild) than a healthy, deliberately made that way, pet store mouse.  Yes they can and do carry diseases that are harmful to rabbits.  They are not in the same category. Parasites, bacteria, viruses.  And they can also be a problem for you too.  For example hantavirus is spread by small rodents.  It is more in certain geogrpahical areas but they are vectors for some nasty stuff.

The solution is to prevent mice from getting into the hay in the first place.  That means containers they cannot chew their way into.  A heavy pvc-thick type of container.  The other part of the solution is fortifying the garden shed so mice cannot get into it.  These are the only two things you can do if you aren't going to relocate or trap the mice getting into your hay supply.

Safety of your rabbits is paramount over anything else.  You need to take the necessary steps to ensure that over anything else you are worried with about the mice.

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hey, I forgot to also add that I'm in Australia in a pretty urban area, if that affects things at all. Regardless I came upon the conclusion I'll bag all the hay from now on and keep it inside because I have heaps of old chaff bags laying around that I forgot about. I'll also be buying a fresh bale asap and keeping that one inside from the start. And when it comes to trapping the mice getting into the hay, aside from the fact I don't want to kill mice, I can imagine mousey corpses near the hay for any amount of time would be worse than live ones.

Answer
Hi,

I wasn't really assuming you had the space inside to store it, depending how big the bales are.  But since you can do this, that is probably the best thing to do.  Make sure whatever you store it in, you keep it off your floor (on a pallet or something) so that if you get water on the floor, the hay won't get wet and moldy.  I store mine in our basement and I actually use old large appliance styrofoam pieces to keep our boxes of hay off the basement floor.

You may find the mouse problem going away on its own if you take away the hay.  They will just move on to another place.  But you will still want to seal up your shed so they don't decide to make it a home and increase their family there.