Can’t stand them, and I live in fear of feeling something skitter across my feet while I’m sitting at my computer. I told the story here a long time ago about how a mama mouse got into my then brand-new car, shredded my air filter to make a nest and birthed a bunch of babies onto it before crawling out onto my dashboard to die. All I could do to not have the car exorcised after that.
I don’t live in the best apartment building, and there’s a tenant on the ground floor with…some troubles, I’ll leave it at that. He started feeding the birds outside the building this year, and shortly thereafter we got an infestation of mice (I guess drawn by the seeds) for the first time in the 13 years I’ve been here. The owners had to put big baits/traps/something in everyone’s apartment, and I started putting snaptraps under the sink after I saw a lot of little green pellets in the cabinet, and started seeing sudden movement along the baseboards out of the corner of my eye. I can’t bring myself to be completely humane and chauffeur the pests out to the countryside. I won’t use glue traps because I don’t relish torturing the things, but a relatively quick neck-break with a spring trap doesn’t prey on my consience that much.
Just yesterday I saw a small dark blur run across the linoleum here at the office as well. My building is right downtown, and there’s always some kind of construction happening that opens us up to the great outdoors. I’ve got bait boxes under my desk at the moment.
Yeah…I was driving home, glanced over to my right and nearly drove onto the sidewalk as a large mouse was lying belly-up on the dash. I yeeted it, but then my car stank of decaying corpse for a few weeks until I could get an appointment with Kia. It was a very memorable text from the garage with an enclosed photo of my air filter.
But, in order to do that, you have to start bringing dead mice home and eating them in front of the cats. Then half-dead mice, so that they see how to kill. Finally release half-dead, then eventually healthy, mice, but don’t finish them off yourself— let the hungry kittens move to make the killing blow.
