The bottom line with using products like mothballs or ammonia to try and repel Scottsdale rodents or any other wild animal for that matter is that the very strong smell of the products puts the animal off, that of course assumes that the animal does not like strong smells in its environment. In using something like this, with a really strong smell, you are really probably trying to put the animals off before they come inside your house because once they are inside and made themselves comfortable it is highly questionable whether things like mothballs or ammonia have any effect on them at all.



There is even at least one professional wild animal removal person who says he uses mothballs as bait in his traps, he states that if the creature has never smelt mothballs there is a better than good chance that it will come to the trap to actually investigate the source of the smell, he knows they don't want to eat it but they definitely want to know what it is, where it came from and what it's doing there. Based on that piece of information I would have to conclude that in a lot of cases mothballs and ammonia are not very good deterrents. It should be said however that that particular professional is mainly trapping raccoons, possums and skunks which are all of course larger animals.

There are a lot of stories from people that live in apartments who swear mothballs drove Scottsdale mice out of their house but upon further investigation most of these proved to be false, either the mice all caught a disease and died or the neighbors wiped out the infestation with traps and poisons. There is something else that everyone should know about mothballs, they are toxic to humans and to your pets so if you're going to use them you have to keep them where neither your pets nor any small children can get at them, both pets and children will investigate them because they probably think they are sweets of some kind, remember that our small white ball shaped object.

According to all the research ammonia might actually have a chance of being a deterrent to small pests like Arizona mice, the reason this is is that all predators urine has high concentrations of ammonia in it, therefore there is the possibility that a mouse might consider a cotton ball soaked in ammonia as being a place where a predator has gone to the toilet, which if you are a mouse is probably not a healthy place to hang around. Another urban myth is that peppermint will deter rodents, don't even waste your money on this one but if you have some peppermint oil in the cupboard that you not using why not use a few drops of it and see what happens, you might have some peculiar mice.

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