That house always had mice. In fact starting with that house and continuing with almost every house I’ve lived in, I’ve had either city mice or country mice, suburban mice or metro-vogue mice. They all ate paper and candles and scared the shit out of me.
As a result, I know more about mice, how to kill them, and some of the amazing and disgusting things they’ll do than I care to admit. Helen, my former boss, told me once that she smelled a horrible rotting smell in her kitchen that she couldn’t figure out. Finally decided to empty her pantry to get to the source. She found a bottle of soy sauce of which a mouse had chewed the plastic lid off, and crawled inside, got stuck and died.
See? That’s just one of the stories in my collection of little known and repulsive facts about the mouse lifestyle.
If you’re not interested in mice and don’t want to read the rest of this blog, leave with this one piece of advice: If you have a mouse in your house, don’t use sticky traps. Ever. I’m aware that the spring-loaded mousetrap was invented in 1894 and since then we’ve made improvements in virtually every single other area of human life, but trust me and my disgusting stories when I tell you that the old fashioned neck-breaking-metal-bar method is the best that we can do for now.
When we lived in South Jersey, we lived in front of a cornfield (aka Vegas for Mice). Shortly after we moved in, the entire field mouse community got word that they should make their way to 33 Byron Drive, because a couple of pack-rat journalists moved in and had lots of old newspapers in the basement, and a whole kitchen drawer full of birthday candles in various colors, good for hours of chewing enjoyment.
I set traps in the basement and caught a bunch of mice, but not before they had shredded some historic headline front pages that my husband and I had collected, a stash of the kids’ kindergarten drawings, and our marriage license.
But it was the mice upstairs, in the kitchen, that really skeeved me out. Unlike Helen, I found very few in the food cupboards, but lots of them in the birthday candle drawer and oddly in the dishtowel-and-pot holder drawer. (Were they cold? Were they looking for blankies?)
For a while I experimented with different kinds of traps. The thought of breaking their little necks bothered me, so I got a couple of sticky traps, those yellow rectangles of death, which are covered with absolutely the stickiest substance on the planet. (Note: If after reading this you still feel you should try these traps, do not – I repeat do not under any circumstance – test them out by putting your finger directly onto the sticky substance. It causes more problems than getting your finger snapped in a regular mousetrap.) I set the first trap in the dishtowel-pot holder drawer in the kitchen.
The next morning I opened the drawer to find the answer to my question How Does This Sticky Trap Kill the Mice? The answer is: The trap doesn’t kill them. They either have heart attacks from the stress or they kill themselves by trying to chew off the body part that is stuck to the trap, in this case the entire lower half of the mouse. By the evidence, I can also assume that there is a lot of thrashing and throwing of limbs involved, as well as some stomach upset and loss of bowel and bladder function. The ensuing mess was enough to make me want to move away and start over with all new stuff. In actuality I had to start over with all new dishtowels and potholders.
I can’t explain why I set a second sticky trap, but I did, in the birthday candle drawer. The next morning I opened the drawer very, very, very slowly, afraid of what I would find. What I found was no blood. No guts. No mouse. No mousetrap.
“What do you mean there was no mousetrap?” my sister Pam asked me when I told her.
“It was gone. The whole mousetrap was gone.”
“Are you sure that one of the kids didn’t take it out?”
“Yeah, right, like they’re going to help with this. No, I set these traps late at night, after everyone’s in bed and I check on them in the morning, before anyone else is up,” I told her. “Besides, no one in our family will open drawers in the kitchen anymore.”
“What you need to do,” Pam said matter-of-factly, “is set three more sticky traps for his other three feet, because you have a mouse walking around your house wearing one big sandal.”
I couldn’t figure out how the mouse got out of the drawer wearing that thing. There had to have been a rescue by his buddies, probably involving pizza coupons, garbage bag twisties and a ball of string from the next drawer down. This was getting serious and I couldn’t let these little rodents conspire against me. So I set a third trap, back in the dishtowel-pot holder drawer, which now contained a single old rag, a token decoy.
The next morning, I opened the drawer (I now was getting very good at opening drawers so slowly my coffee got cold in the process) and there was the mousetrap and there was the mouse. There had been no chewing and thrashing and there were no signs of a rescue attempt. But he was still alive. He was lying there on his side, all peaceful-like, his little eyes closed and his chest pumping up and down with his breath. This was bad. Very, very bad. I wasn’t about to touch the trap, afraid that the movement would revive him and he would lash out at my finger and if I slipped and my finger ended up on the yellow sticky stuff with a living mouse . . . oh, god . . .
So I closed the drawer and stuck a Post It on the outside that said, “DO NOT OPEN. MOUSE INSIDE.” It took three days for the mouse to die, with all five of us occasionally opening the drawer to check on his progress and timing his chest movements.
That was the end of my experiment with other kinds of traps. Breaking their necks was the clear winner. So I set more neck-breaker traps in all the hot spots, including all around the basement. Then one day, the mouse grapevine must have gotten word to vacate 33 Byron Drive. Maybe the guy with the sandal finally made it back to the field to report the horrors. In any event, we never had another mouse in the house for the rest of the year.
But there would be other houses and other mice. So far, here in Florida, we don’t have mice, but the snakes and lizards are enough. I’m thinking of leaving bottles of soy sauce in every room, just in case.
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13 comments:
Our first house had a basement under the front portion of the house and a crawl space under the back portion. After realizing we had mouse problems we ended up getting a cat. "Perky" would move into the kitchen right after dinner and just sit and wait.... for HOURS- We put a piece of paper on the refrig and made little footprints to signify every mouse killed... kinda like the old fighter pilots did with planes they shot down... that first winter she killed something like 38 mice.... Best mouse catcher ever...
I could do a whole post myself to comment - during a renovation at my parent's house when I was 14, mice got in. We (I) set traps at night. One night - climb into bed. Thwap. Dead mouse. Empty. Set. Climb into bed. Thwap. Dead mouse. Empty. Set. Climb into bed. Thwap. Not dead mouse. It was caught across the middle. I carried it upstairs to my mom who said - Don't make it suffer. Hit it on the head and kill it. "No Way!" sez me - "You do it" "No - I can't - you do it". We argued until the poor thing finally died on its own.
A couple years ago, my husband insisted we had a mouse. I didn't believe it - there was no poop - no chewed up stuff. But he insisted he'd seen it and there were sorted piles of dog food under the stove. Hubby has an irritating habit of filling the sink with boiling hot water and leaving dishes to soak - but he doesn't wash them. The water gets cold and icky and I have to stick my hand it to get the stopper out. He did this once just before we had our kitchen floor replaced. We left for a couple days to let the tiles set. When we came back, there was a dead mouse floating in the sink. Guess he was right.
We have a very old house in the city and so mice are always a problem. Right now we have a cat so she takes care of them but there have been many times when we didn't have a cat. I tried one of those live traps because I hated killing them with the old fashioned neck breakers (they didn't always die and suffered). Never caught a single mouse with that thing. they would set it off all the time, but it was always empty. Finally had to go back to the killers. Here's a tip, put the trap in a paper bag so that when it goes off, all you do is pick up the bag and toss it. No having to clean up the blood after.
I wrote a post about my best mouse story called 'the bone'. It's in my archives, July 30. Worth a read I think.
I was hoping this post would bring out the funny mouse stories. I knew I could count on all of you!!
Ellen, I can't find your archives. Can you post a link here?
I've never tried a sticky trap, and thanks to your blog, I never will. A good old-fashioned mousetrap, baited with peanut butter, works for me every time.
When the tears stop rolling down my cheeks from laughter, I'll use some of your ideas!
Ironically, I aquished a mouse the other day that had climbed in a tennis shoe, as I watched.
I stepped over the opening of the shoe to trap him, but he escaped. Without thinking, I stepped on him...it was look pulling the string on a Party- Popper! YUK!!!
Gracie the Basset Hound wanted to clean up the mess for me. I politely declined her offer.
This is getting really gross. The grossest being that thing where you have to stick your hand in cold, greasy dish water to pull the stopper out. I hate that, whether there's a dead mouse in there or not.
I once had a mouse get into the cabinet above the microwave. I guess he got stuck, because when I found him, he'd been up there for a while--mouse poop everywhere--but had actually died from trying to chew through the microwave cable. Poor little guy. Electrocution was probably better than starving to death!
We just used the 'sticky' this week...Bud left the beady-eyed (still very alive) mouse on the counter for me to see before my morning coffee. He just keeps getting sweeter and sweeter. At least we only have 1 mouse story to tell...but lots of rat stories from when we lived on the other side of the island! Nevermind...
Oh my. That's just an awful experience for all involved. I am sorry. But I am also sorry because I am laughing at the Post It note... The stickies are the worst because you either have to wait for them to die or you actually need to kill the mouse yourself. My husband had to do it and it broke him up so much that he didn't even want to talk about it.
Karen, I think you need to start your own blog. I'm sure you have lots of adventures to write about. ;)
Our house in NE Ohio is eight years old. It was built in the woods, and the mice were there first. We started hearing chewing noises upstairs and in walls shortly after moving in, in the winter. WTF? So I went up into the attic and it was full of mouse poop and mice. FULL.
You're right, the old wooden neckbreakers are the way to go, because you can HEAR them pop! "Ha! Got another one!" Loaded a bunch of them up with peanut butter and whacked a load. Learned to stuff aluminum foil up into the corners of the vinyl siding to keep them from climbing up and in.
And did you know that some rat traps have a blade, not a bar? Learned this when working in a hospital kitchen back in high school! Now THAT's a MESS.
I had read your blog and was feeling pretty cocky since we have always had a cat and never seen a mouse in the house (at least one that wasn't in his mouth already.) AND THEN, Thursday night I started hearing this frantic scratching sound coming from inside the wall in our living room. Our cat became obsessed with it and kept guarding the spot as if he expected the animal to come bursting through the wall at any minute. I dealt with it by leaving the house and staying away as long as I could. The sounds were still there yesterday but became much fainter, and I made a mental note to get some of the crystals from Home Depot that you pour into your walls when something dies inside. Even the cat got bored with the wall and went back to his customary nap. Then when I walked out of the laundry room, I noticed something hiding under the little desk in the living room. It was a very live land crab, scratching against the tile floors. We caught him in a box and released him outside by the lake. I'm hoping somehow that was the sound in the wall although I have no idea how he could have gotten in or out. That's a Florida mouse story.
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