I pit mice

The BBQ Pit
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Sorry if this isn’t right, it’s my first post on here (been lurking for a while) but I fucking hate mice. The house mouse, the cute furry bastard of disease.

So I left my apartment for a few weeks, come back, the stove is covered in shit. Mouse shit. The floor next to the fridge is covered in the same. Thanks, mice. Thanks for the reminder that I didn’t scrub every surface before my absence. It’s okay, really, I’ve had a couple mice before, set out the traps and catch them. Except my trap broke, so I spend 15 dollars on a new one. A plastic monstrosity called tri-kill, from Victor Pest Control. I set out this plastic death trap and what do I get?

Nothing. No, less than nothing, I get a trap that’s been set off, with nothing in it, and all of the peanut butter is gone. Okay, I’m an idiot for not buying straight up snap traps. That’s okay. I call Victor and complain about how terrible their trap is and they agree to send me the equally priced set of 20 cheap snap traps free of charge. Well they screwed up and sent me 20 packs of 4, and now I have 80 or so mouse traps, but that’s not the point, damn it.

Anyway, armed with the confidence that I have the right trap for the job, I set one out. Within the hour, I’ve killed.

I put out another. Within three hours I’ve gone and done it again. I’m well on the way to becoming a serial mouse murderer. I talked to an exterminator that happened to be in the neighborhood and said it was likely that I had about 7 or 8 and just to keep setting traps. Well I did.

To no avail.

I set the third trap and waited eagerly to feel the guilty pleasure that can come only at a small mammal’s demise. Even if it is a disease spreading bastard, I still feel gross. And instead I ended up with a clean trap. What the fuck. I set a new one. It goes clean too. I set yet another and one day flip on the kitchen light to see a tiny mouse sitting on top of the trap licking off the peanut butter. Motherfucker.
I have babies.

Baby mice big enough to be off the tit but small enough to use my traps as a feeding post with impunity. Anyway I learned through the internet how to properly bait the trap so that even tiny mice will set them off, and that’s what I’m doing, and now I’m killing tiny little cute fuzzy pops with their eyes bulging out because of the force of the snap bar and the sound of their scurrying feet wake me in the middle of the night and the horrors i see as i kill the children of the innocent and god damn it I didn’t sign up for this. So go to hell mice. Go to hell for making me feel for and kill you. Why couldn’t you leave this poor man alone?

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Relevant documentary

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this is both helpful and not, at the same time.

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Par for the course in the Pit.

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Eighty mousetraps?

Eighty mousetraps?

Well, look on the bright side. Once your mouse problem is over with, you are going to be the KING of the Pranksters.

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Maybe this will lift your spirits :smiley:

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FWIW, I’ve had really good results with the “Tin Cat,” a non-lethal trap. Mice can be sentenced to transportation and exile, rather than death.

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You know what annoys me about mice? And about rodents in general? That they’re mammals. Mammals are supposed to be big and smart, like dolphins and cats and elephants and apes. Rodents are just stupid trashy little vermin that don’t know how to do anything except breed. They drag down the reputation of the entire order.

Kill the little bastards.

Except for hamsters. Hamsters are cute.

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thanks for the tip but I’ve read too much about the futility of live traps (either they find their way back or they die anyway) and as cute as they are my heart just doesn’t bleed enough for them to do it.

And yeah Freddy the Pig, I actually do get angrier that they’re mammals than if my house were infested with lizards or something.

Actually I like lizards, that’d be pretty sweet.

ETA: Oh yeah, and they’re emptying my traps again. It’s time for poison.

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I second those, as they catch mice all night.

I caught 3 in one night with one, one.

Just drop the whole thing in a bucket of water, & drown the little twerps.

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Electronic traps are the best and most humane. They don’t kick in until the mouse completes the circuit and then its all over in an instant.

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Ah, well… I’m too soft-hearted to kill 'em directly. I take 'em way out into the gulch and let 'em go there. And, sure, I’m just feeding the owls, but at least I’m not doing the killing directly or immediately. I suppose the distinction is abstract.

Anyway, the gulch is far enough away, I know they aren’t finding their way back.

I just haven’t got it in me to do so. (I did once have to euthanize a cat, the “Ol’ Yeller” way. But it hurt.) Drowning is a nasty way to go. (With their tiny bodies and fast metabolism, it’s a lot quicker for them than it would be for us…)

There’s an old Jeff Jones “Idyll” comics page where a beautiful woman is exulting about nature. Nature is good, nature is wonderful, God sure knew what he was doing when he created the world. Then she sees a spider… “Stomp! Stomp! Stomp!”

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I know a guy. :eek: :smiley:

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How much to break their kneecaps?

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Youse should talks to Big Louie.
Be perlite.
Big Louie frowns on mugs dat aint perlite.

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Buy some snakes. Then latter a mongoose or two.

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We wouldn’t be here without the small, cowering mammals that survived extinction. Anyway, rats are smart. Dolphins are wannabe fish and cats suck.

Also, Mammalia is a class, not an order. Rodentia is a class, though.

Personally, I think if you’re going to decide to kill something, you have a responsibility to do it as humanely as possible. Fuck people who want something dead but are too squeamish to get their hands dirty and do it properly.

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How dirty do you suggest the OP’s hands get? You’re advocating cervicocephalic subluxation?

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Move to Puerto Rico, then. They have ‘lagartijos’ all over the place, including in the houses. They also don’t have many mice, because the larger lizards (I don’t remember what those were called) eat 'em.

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I’m not an expert in humane killings, having never had to do it myself. Maybe an air pistol would be a good option?