[mauvehaus]

A mouse died in my plow truck this summer and the smell was unreal. Like, thank god I got the power windows working bad.

I was told that Irish Spring soap is minty enough to repel mice. Based on the scratch/tooth marks in the bar I left in the glovebox, it apparently isn't.

Next summer, I'll try something with peppermint oil. Assuming I can get the transmission fixed for a reasonable price. Not having reverse is proving to be a hassle.

[jbotz]

Pure essential peppermint oil definitely works as a rodent repellent, even in very small quantities, although the effect wears off pretty quickly (that's the thing about essential oils, the essence is volatile). Plan to reapply every 3-7 days. Btw. the reason it works that that for rodents the sense of smell is primary, and mint smell overpowers everything else, so in its presence they are effectively blind.

[kragen]

Be careful with essential oils. In most cases the lethal dose for an adult human is about 5 grams.

[throwup238]

Do you drink your essential oils? Unless they’re laced with DMSO, I don’t see how five grams of the active ingredient could be absorbed.

[kragen]

Drinking them is usually how fatal doses are reached, yes. There isn't much risk topically, as you say, or by inhalation. I have read in the literature of one fatality from topical oil of wintergreen, I believe a teenaged marathon runner who was treating her muscle pain. I don't know if her preparation (an FDA-approved over-the-counter patch from a mainstream pharmaceutical company, if I recall) used DMSO or similar excipients. But such topical fatalities are very unusual.

But we are specifically discussing ingestion of non-recommended substances here.

To correct a minor misconception that could arise from your comment: essential oils do not contain active ingredients. They are, generally speaking, the active ingredient. Some, like oil of wintergreen, are an almost pure compound, while others, like oil of peppermint, are mixtures, but generally they do not contain inert or nontoxic components.

One specific way that a fatal dose could be ingested is if the person ingesting it had previously obtained adulterated essential oils from an irresponsible drug dealer, containing an active ingredient but consisting mostly of something like canola oil, and then switched to a pure essential oil without realizing it.

[throwup238]

I don’t think people are ingesting peppermint oil to ward off rats in a plow truck.

It really doesn’t matter how you classify the active ingredient (and there is absolutely an active ingredient). It’s not getting absorbed in five gram quantities unless you snort it, drink it, or apply a stupid homeopathic topical with DMSO that penetrates the skin.

Edit: you’ve edited your post several times since I’ve made mine and I’m just not going to bother. There a dozen everpresent household chemicals that are deadlier than essential oils by a long shot. Nobody seems to have a problem except the kids who eat Tide pods, and they solved that with a zipper.

[kragen]

People who are handling chemicals whose lethal dose is less than a teaspoon need to understand the hazards involved. That is as true of common household chemicals like lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid as it is for essential oils (though I would not describe any of those three as "everpresent").

However, it is worth noting that most household chemicals have a much larger lethal dose (are much less toxic) than commonplace essential oils! Such less-toxic chemicals include not only Tide Pods, but also everything else commonly used for laundry (even liquid bleach), window-cleaning ammonia, kerosene, unleaded gasoline, hair-bleaching-concentration hydrogen peroxide, most paint thinners, and even industrial degreasers like trisodium phosphate. I thought bleaching powder (calcium hypochlorite) was an exception, but I just looked up its LD50, and it's 850mg/kg orl-rat. So the lethal dose for an adult human is probably about 50 grams, which is an order of magnitude less toxic than oil of peppermint.

(Lye, sulfuric acid, and hydrochloric acid aren't toxic per se. You can safely add unlimited quantities of them to your food if they're dilute enough. But in reasonably concentrated forms they're corrosive enough to cause fatal injuries if ingested, even, potentially, at the teaspoon quantities we're talking about. Your mileage may vary, though, and you may just end up permanently maimed.)

It is possible that you don't appreciate just how small a quantity five grams is, or you have a vastly exaggerated idea of how dangerous commonplace household chemicals are. I have no idea how you could get to a dozen. Are you poisoning your rats with strychnine and sodium cyanide? There are much safer options now, you know. Most people stopped keeping those in their houses decades ago, even in poor countries.

(Yes, I edited my comment, just as you did, because I think it's important to make it a high-quality comment so that people who read it are not misinformed.)

[jcgrillo]

Plowing without reverse is a sport I'd pay to watch lol

[mauvehaus]

I promise it's not as exciting as you're imagining. Getting the truck back out of the snow bank, on the other hand, would probably be amusing in a schadenfreude sort of way. Lacking traction (because winter), we used a lot of momentum. It was pretty undignified.

[jcgrillo]

I was imagining high speed 4 wheel drifting and momentum preserving gymkhana turns.