Of Mice and Men

Every year around the late fall and early spring we have a little mouse issue here at Casa Sheep.  We've walked the perimeter of the house with our can of expanding spray foam sealing all the pipe entrances.
Every single food item in our house is decanted into glass or plastic containers.  Bread?  Kept high up in the microwave/bread box.
In fact, the only available food in the house is a half of a cup of dry dog kibble placed in the pooper's bowl twice a day.  She is sometimes a grazer and not a scarfer in opposition to most Beagle behavior. Truthfully, she is really just waiting to see if a better offer is coming via a plate to be cleaned or an open dishwasher door to be licked. We wouldn't want to be full of kibble if an opportunity presented itself.  Once all options have been assessed and it is determined that the food of last resort must be eaten, then and only then, do we clear our bowl. This of course means that there is sometimes food down for hours at a time.

One year we moved a bookcase that is in the kitchen to put down an area rug and hidden underneath it, tucked up from the open back side against the front skirting board were cups and cups of dry dog kibble.
Obviously some small army of mice spent there evenings working like leaf cutter ants moving the kibble across the kitchen floor.
Once we found that stash and closed up the back panel we thought we were all set.

Then one night I was baking something in one of the ovens at a rather high heat.  There was a pervasive smell of burning in the house, yet each time I opened the oven door to check, the dish I was cooking  looked just fine.  No burning going on here.  Finally an hour later when we shut the oven off, plumes of smoke started to filter out the vent of the backsplash.  The next day we disassembled the front panel of the oven kickplate.  I bet you can guess what we found.

We then proceeded to dismantle the entire two ovens, piece by piece.  Located in a lovely 'V' shaped niche directly above where the pilot and subsequent heating element there were several cups of dog kibble wedged in.

Sigh.

Each time we would begin our mouse trapping process with a trip to the Po to check out the animal control aisle.

You know the one.  People dash down the aisle in trench coats, with shades on or hoods up, never glancing at a fellow shopper or making eye contact.  This my friends is the aisle of shame.  Your mere presence in this aisle indicates that you have a pest problem and by default you assume that the other people are thinking, this must be a dirty person.  If they have ants, mice, cockroaches or 'insert filthy animal here', then they must live in a trash filled ghetto pit.
Ladies and Gentlemen I am here to tell you that this is just not true.

Mice want to be warm.  Your house is warm and may contain food. Ergo mice want to live there.  With you.

Thus began our mouse eradication project.

Since we have a dog, poison was not an option. 

Glue traps are also not an option.  I once saw a mouse trying to chew its leg off to escape a glue trap when I worked in the Schrafft's building in Charlestown. IT scarred me for life.

The old fashioned snap neck trap.  Again, not a pretty sight.  I prefer that my mice leave quietly and preferably without my viewing the body. I often watch House on Tuesday nights from behind my closed fingers because I just can't look at all the bodily fluids, internal organs, and ick. Dead mice with broken necks and lobbing swollen tongues.  No.

We tried the friendly trap that opens like a garage door and balances delicately on a pivot.  In theory you bait the far end of the trap, with cheese of course, because everyone knows mice love cheese.  Right?
The mouse then saunters in and when he gets halfway through the trap he sets the pivot back and the garage door closes down and boom.  Mousie trapped.  You can either choose to toss the whole shebang in the trash or you can be nice and PETA like about it and take your little mousie for a drive and release him next to your least favourite neighbours house and then pray that he decides to move in with them instead of you.  This worked for us a few times until one day we saw that the trap had been dragged across the counter, on to the stove and something was attempting to drag it down the vent to the griddle.  We realised at that moment that we had a BIG MOTHER of a mouse.

We then purchased a perfect trap.  Inside it was the old fashioned mousetrap, but it had a bitchin' set of emperor's clothes.  Half of the trap flipped open so you could bait the trap or 'remove' the latest victim.
The trap could then be cleaned and reset later.  This was the best mouse trap we had found up until now.  It served us through one spring and a fall catching at least 5 or 6 mice.  Husband would bait the trap with peanut butter.  Yea peanut butter, we found out that it was like crack to a mouse.  They could not resist the peanuty goodness.  Thankfully they were not picky about crunchy vs. smooth, cause if I had to have peanut butter in the house it was going to be the kind I liked damn it!  I would get up in the morning, peek around the kitchen corner and if I saw a tail sticking out of the hole I would not enter the kitchen until husband had done his husbandly duties and removed the offending object.

Yup.  I'm a real girl when it comes to mice.  I may not scream when I see one, in fact I think they are really rather cute, but dead mice, that is another story entirely.

The other day I realised that we had visitors again when I saw some tell tale 'brown rice' in the pooper's bowl.  I cleaned it up and warned husband that we needed to set the trap again.  Sadly our favourite device had caught it's last visitor.  The trigger would not stay triggered any more.  We donned our trench coats and dark glasses and headed to the local Po.

The old saw about inventing a better mouse trap is indeed not just hyperbole.  There were now at least 3 new styles of mouse trap along with the old types.  Sadly of course this meant that our old favourite was no longer to be found.  After much debate we decided to get some of these as they looked like they were intended to be the next generation of our old stand by. The only thing we didn't really like about these is that they were one use traps.  Set them, catch them and throw them away. Than as almost an afterthought we tossed one of these in the cart. It was $19.99 at the Po, and required 4 AA batteries, but if it worked I didn't care.

We brought it home and husband took care of setting it up and baiting it with peanut butter.  It has an LED on the top which should blink if you 'caught' anything. I peeked around the corner of the kitchen door in the morning but there was no LED blinking.  I flipped the switch off and started making tea. Husband came down awhile later and started moaning about how the trap was crap and how he thought it wouldn't work and as he was doing this he opened the top. 

The peanut butter was gone.

After messing around for 5 minutes or so he realised that the batteries weren't making contact on one of the springs.  He set it right and now when he turned the power on the LED blinked for a second to let him know it was activated.  That night the trap was baited again.  In the morning?  A mouse. We named him Fred.

Husband decided we had lulled him into a false sense of security the first night.   He just assumed that he could cruise into the magic box of crack and have his fix with no repercussions. Ha!  Of course you know that emptying the trap is husband's job right?  That night we set the trap again.  The next morning?  Another mouse.  Now we decided that this mouse thought Fred was taking too damn long at the crack house and he was going to have to go and get some himself. 

Last night we set the trap again.  Guess what?  Another mouse.  Obviously we have the Walton's of mice living in our walls. Of course we will set the trap again tonight.  Shall we all just hope that all the little bugger';s have been caught. Current cost of the trap? $6.63333333333333333

And may the morgue of bodies scattered around behind the garage serve as a warning to all future mice.  This crack house baby is CLOSED FOR BUSINESS. If that doesn't work I'm going to set their little heads on toothpicks around the perimeter like Cade's head on the Tower Bridge.

That'll teach 'em.