---
title: "Stoat living under a cabin keeps the mice away in a Reddit clip, and its ermine hunting skills explain why"
url: https://badiyaa.com/stoat-cabin-rodent-control-ermine/
published: 2026-11-15T04:08:00+00:00
modified: 2026-11-15T04:08:00+00:00
section: Pets & Animals
publisher: Badiyaa
---

# Stoat living under a cabin keeps the mice away in a Reddit clip, and its ermine hunting skills explain why

A stoat living under a cabin is the owner's best rodent control, a Reddit clip says; the ermine eats a quarter of its weight in prey every day.

A stoat has moved in beneath a cabin, and its owner is thrilled. The clip, posted to a popular Reddit nature community and carried onto Reddit’s front page, came with a blunt verdict in its title: “Having a stoat living near my cabin is probably the best rodent control i could ever ask for.”

The poster later explained why the arrangement works without turning the cabin into a larder. “My cabins don’t have a loft, and they are lifted. So everything they kill they store under the cabin, not in it,” they wrote in the comments.

## Readers trade their own stoat stories

The thread filled with similar encounters. One commenter described a stoat poking its head out from under a TV stand at a cabin around 2am one spring, then clearing out the mice. Another recalled a “porch weasel” living under a house at the edge of the boreal forest that dented the local squirrel numbers. Not everyone was charmed: several people warned that the same animal is bad news for backyard chickens, and one reply noted that the post had probably “triggered the entire country of new zealand.”

That last joke has a real basis, and it says a lot about what the cabin owner is hosting.

## How a 9-ounce hunter clears out rodents

The stoat (*Mustela erminea*) is a small mustelid found across Eurasia and northern North America, where it is often called the short-tailed weasel. In its white winter coat, with a black tail tip that never changes color, it is the ermine. Males average about 258 grams, roughly 9 ounces, and females come in under 180 grams.

Mouse-sized rodents make up most of its diet, though it regularly tackles rabbits and other prey much bigger than itself. It hunts by moving fast and probing every hole and crevice it passes. Small victims are killed with a bite to the back of the neck. When food is plentiful, a stoat will kill more than it can eat and stash the extra, which fits neatly with the cabin owner’s description of a cache under the floor.

It does not even dig its own home. A stoat moves into the burrows of the rodents it has killed and lines the nest with their fur. It has also been recorded denning in odd spots, including log piles stacked against house walls.

## A calculation: the appetite behind the pest control

A stoat eats about 50 grams of food a day, equal to roughly a quarter of its body weight. Run that over a year and the total is 50 x 365 = 18,250 grams, or about 18 kilograms (40 pounds). For a 180-gram female, that is around 100 times her own weight in prey every year, which is why one resident stoat can make such a dent in a cabin’s mouse problem.

## Why New Zealand winces

Stoats were shipped from Britain to New Zealand in the 1880s to control rabbits and hares, over the objections of scientists including ornithologist Walter Buller. Bird numbers fell within six years. The species now ranks among the world’s 100 worst invaders, a reminder of why Australia’s Queensland treats rabbits themselves as a [biosecurity threat that bans them as pets](https://badiyaa.com/queensland-pet-rabbits-illegal-biosecurity/). Orkney, off northern Scotland, has spent £7.9 million trapping more than 6,300 stoats since its eradication project began in 2018.

Stoats are also skilled tree climbers that raid nest boxes, so a cabin with a busy [winter bird feeder](https://badiyaa.com/black-oil-sunflower-winter-bird-feeding/) may be feeding both songbirds and the rodents that follow them. In the stoat’s native range, that makes it a welcome tenant. As winter closes in, the northern ones molt into ermine white, starting from the belly and working toward the back.

## Further reading

- [Wikipedia: Stoat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoat)

*Image: Tony Wood, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons*

*This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*