For some reason, the mice have been really bad in our part of the country this year. It’s gotten to the point that we’ve borrowed our daughter’s cat to help get rid of them. She’s caught 4 today. I’m a little morally torn as to how to react when she catches one. On the one hand, I don’t like to see any creature suffer and the mice clearly don’t enjoy the game that the cat plays with them. She does the typical “catch and release and catch”. Eventually, the mouse suffers enough physical trauma that it lies there practically lifeless. At this point, I take the mouse outside and put it out of its misery. I could, if I were so inclined, take the mouse away from the cat just as soon as she catches it, take it outside and assuming that it doesn’t get away, put it out of my misery.
I don’t like mice. My wife hates mice. I’m afraid that if I immediately take the mice outside, the cat will lose some of her desire to catch them since playing with them is 90% of the fun.
Start an Internet shopping company.
If you take them outside, be sure to drive them at least a few miles from your house or else they’ll smell their way back. If that’s not feasible, do you have any neighbours with one of those old-timey mail slots in the door?
Let the cat have his fun.
Let’s put this in perspective: Hundreds of thousand of creature die every day at the clutches of their predators. This is how nature works. There is no moral ambiguity here.
Furthermore, if cats weren’t inclined to catch mice, humans probably would have never bothered domesticating them thousands of years ago. Now think of all that love lost over the past thousand years had we not domesticated them.
By this standard, one could argue that you have a moral duty to let the cat have his fun. If only to insure cats STAY domesticated for the next thousand years. Thus, providing much valued companionship for future generations.
Okay, that would be a silly argument make, but you get my point.
Find some treats that the cat really likes. My cat Livvy (RIP) liked her Friskies’ treats so much that she learned to sit up and beg for them! I tried to find the same ones, but apparently the market has changed a bit since the early 90’s. LOL!
Anyway, yummy treat and petting when she gets one, you take it away and deal with it humanely.
We had a discussion a while back on just which way was most humane. Someone suggested that car starter fluid is mostly Ether, which sounded like the best option to me. Just find an old tupperware tub with a a tight-fitting lid (make sure your wife is OK with donating it!) and tuck Mickey in for a nice long nap.
Bless you for caring! We can not tolerate vermin in our homes, but where options exist we can certainly dispatch them compassionately.
I struggle with this, too. We have a hobby farm, 3 cats. They catch a lot of mice, and this is a good thing. They do frequently eat the mice they kill. I don’t want to discourage them, but damn, they’re mean. Mostly I just leave them to it, circle of life and all that. If they don’t seem serious about killing one, I’ll take it and smash it, blunt force trauma being much more efficient than trying to gas the critters. It’s not pleasant, but mice kind of suck.
Snap traps to supplement the cat. If there’s anything the cat likes more than catching mice, you could try switching the reward for the prey, otherwise… I suppose you’re a nice person for asking.
On the other hand, consider the trouble and destruction mice cause.
I need help with squirrels. They’re too big for my cats, they climb away from my dogs. I hates them. Rats with furry tails they are.
When we moved to our current apartment we discovered the new place had mice by finding our cat Púca playing with one.
By the time we came across the first couple of mice it was clear that they were already gravely injured, spine probably broken and not able to move, but squeaking and breathing. Those we took outside to the back deck and dispatched quickly.
The last one we found still early in the bat-the-mousie-around game, and it was still basically unscathed, just terrified. That one we took out of the building and to the end of the block and let it go on the cemetery wall.
The thing is, Púca is an indoor-only cat and had literally never seen a living mouse before. He didn’t try to eat or even kill any of the mice, and I’m pretty sure he had no idea that they could be food – he just saw them as really cool moving toys. A hungry, hunting cat will dispatch the mouse quickly and eat it. Púca was never going to do anything with it other than play with it until it stopped moving. So he got praise and pets and a distraction in the form of a fake mouse. He didn’t really care that we took the dying mice away.
He didn’t lose out on anything and the mice didn’t suffer – win-win.
And we made sure building maintenance found and blocked all of the mouse holes in our apartment.
Our kitty normally kills her mousy catches pretty quickly, and we’re eternally grateful for her efforts. Last week though, she chose to play games with her mouse, and three hours later, was still doing the catch-and-release-catch-and-release thing…so whilst she was briefly looking away I rescued the mouse and let it go in the farthest part of the garden.
Yeah, it’s probably back in the kitchen now, but I have dreams that it made a heroic escape into SOMEONE ELSE’S GARDEN.
Admittedly, never seen any mice around. I guess I’d scream at her to drop the critter, not necessarily out of concern for the mouse, but worried about my cat getting rabies or something.
She does kill the occasional bird and I understand there’s some danger of her getting something.
The Maine Coon practises catch and release. Ie. he catches the mouse, brings it into the house, tells us about it at which moment the mouse escapes, much excited cat activity, the mouse gets behind a bookshelf/under the fridge…and the Maine Coon shrugs. I’ll get another. Or a baby rabbit.
Thus we have to set mouse traps to get those on the run. Grump.
I take it as the mouse is in the wrong place, a place where a mouse was not meant to be, and that is not your fault. A place where the mouses end will be of pain and suffering.
Say a prayer that the mouse soul finds it’s way to a happier place, this way God thinks you care about the mouse and will grant it, but you are really fooling the big G into getting Him not to put any more mice in your house.
Our cats would love it if we had mice. Hermes and Hestia desperately want to chase, catch, and kill something.
I know that we were in the pet store several years ago, and noticed that the real pet mice were cheaper than the Cat Toy Stuffed Mice, and the thought crossed our minds that it would be more cost effective to have them play with actual mice, before we decided that was perverse.
Just before she died, our aged, overweight, arthritic cat Midnight actually caught a chipmunk. She was waiting at the door with it in her mouth, and wanted to brink it in to gloat over the other cats (she’d done exactly that in her younger years – “Look! I have a Thing, and you don’t!”). But we wouldn’t let her.
The proper behaviour is to praise the cat. Place a Wellington boot along a wall. If the mouse escapes it will hide in the boot, at which point you boil a kettle then pour the boiling water into the boot. This kills the mouse instantly. You can then dispose of the body.
