My apartment has mice. Several of them. Occasionally they fall into my waste paper baskets and can’t get out. (three times this has happened) The first time I took the mouse outside to the roof of the building and let him out. Second time it was about 4 in the morning and I didn’t feel like taking it outside so I put the garbage can in my bathtub thinking that if he manages to chew through the bag he will have a bugger of time scaling the walls of my tub…by the morning he was gone…
So having just come back from a weekend trip I discovered a little baby mouse hopping around in my garbage can. I caught site of a relative of his poking around looking for him I guess.
Now… What should I do with this little guy? I’d prefer not to kill him. But would releasing him out in a field some where be a death sentence anyway?
And I don’t suppose you can keep a wild mouse as a pet… On account of all the diseases they may carry.
Make a decision. He is either vermin or an unlucky fellow traveler in this plane of existence. If vermin, flush him down the toilet. It will be a quick and relatively painless death compared to the alternatives. If he is a fellow creature deserving of mercy flush him down the toilet. It will be a quick and relatively painless death compared to the alternatives.
I was looking through a drawer – third from the bottom – in a dresser. In this drawer was a teradactyl beanie baby. I noticed that the beanie baby was oddly torn. When I picked it up to examine it, its entire contents of fluff and plastic “beans” spilled out into the drawer.
There, lying in the drawer, were three tiny pink baby mice. They were really newborn. Pink, hairless, blind, I could see their tiny hearts beating. The mother had opened the doll and given birth inside of it. In an eerie way I was reminded of “Alien”.
I was torn about what to do, but I decided eventually to flush them down the toilet and set a trap. Later I caught the mother.
I felt really guilty, but I didnt have any other choice.
The real problem is that now you feel responsible having interfered with the mouse’s life by removing it from your garbage can. You can look at this several ways.
You are responsible and by logical extension you are responsible for all the mice that have died in your trash can so that you could continue your frivolous, vain existence. Indeed all the life which has died or not come into being because of your every action is your responsibility and to redeem yourself you must identify some greater good and dedicate yourself to it completely as penance.
You are responsible but only for this mouse because you were not aware of the others and no action or decision of yours directly caused their deaths. They contributed to their own demise or their death was caused by some other agent like God or Dharma, you however have the power to save this life and are morally obligated to do so to the extent that an action of yours can alter it’s fate. Release the mouse in a park with a piece of stale bread.
You are responsible but this mouse is a competitor in the struggle for life. Eat him.
You are not responsible, you are merely a strand in the web of existence. Leave him till you were going to empty the trash anyway or he starts to stink.
I don’t know of any disease mice carry if they are cleaned and deloused.
Mice spread the Hantavirus class of diseases. These diseases are potentially fatal to humans.
See the link– http://www.bocklabs.wisc.edu/ed/hanta.html
How Buddha-like you are to give up your physical existence in such a painful way, just to save a filth vermin.
And, how un-Buddha like you are to endanger your communities health to save filth vermin.
If you want to be humane, and possibly look like a sentimental fool, you can call pet shops in your area and ask 'em if they’d be interested. Odds are your mouse will end up as an appetizer for some kid’s snake, but, hey, it may also be adopted by some little girl.
I suppose the humane society may do a brisk traffic in mice as well…
Hanta virus is actually carried in the droppings of mice, not mice themselves. It is very rare and contracted by breathing in particles of virus infected mouse droppings. In the past the virus has infected those in rural areas, usually when they return to a cabin, or campsite, and shake out blankets that mice have been living in. The shaking allows the dropping to go airborne in dust-like particles, and then inhaled.
Mr. Green Fool, your little mouse is no more likely to be bearing disease than other feral creature.
I have an elderly aunt who also saw a mouse and thought it was cute and it would awful to kill it. By the time she reacted she had a full blown infestation which required major treatment and was a PITA (not to mention the neigbors were not happy). Believe me, you do not want that.
If you really don’t want to kill it, take it out and release it in a field somewhere. If it’s a death sentence anyway as you say, at least you won’t know about it and won’t have to perform the gruesome execution yourself.
Can anyone come up with one environmental excuse to keep the mice around?
I had something like that once, the mice kept showing up & putting their droppings on everything & chewing up stuff & making nests in the sofa. So I got one of those sticky traps from the store (about $5)…put it out & in one night caught about 7 of them, two adults & 5 young ones.
These were gray-charcoal mice (are yours?)
Yeah, I know sticky traps suck, sorry about that. THing is, I didn’t know what to do with the tray later, because they said on the tray box you can push them off the tray with a pencil (wear really heavy gloves too, they said) & let them go in some field or something. So I put the tray outside for an hour, which probably wasn’t too bright an idea as it seems the local birds took a fancy to them.
Do you think that mouse would think twice about giving you the plague? I say kill him.
If you really don’t want to kill him yourself, then put him out in a field. Maybe he’s as good as dead, but at least it’s life would have been part of the food chain after being eaten by some hawk or other predator rather than drowning, with it’s corpse floating around your city’s sewers.
