Rodent Plague

[aggienaut]

   We have a bit of a rodent plague here right now. It's not as bad down here as it is in New South Wales but still, I seem to have at least one mouse living in every room. They're always darting between furniture out of the corner of my eye, I hear them chewing on things all night and lie there hoping they're not in the act of ruining something, and in the morning I find their poop all over the table and counters. I realize now what a "bread box" is actually for -- and not having one I've taken to storing my bread in the microwave.

   Legendary cat Cato doesn't actually live with me unfortunately, he lives at work. Every now and then I glance outside and see the neighbor cat Bailey walking by, and throw open the door calling out to him "Bailey come patrol for mice!" And, lo, he immediately changes direction and walks right in, and then he proceeds to walk the perimeter of my house sniffing around at all the nooks mice could be in. As he passes the kitchen I'll open the undersink cabinets and he'll walk in and sniff about and then come out. Once he's done a thorough inspection he proceeds to the door to be let out. He does this so purposefully it's like he's a pest control professional just doing a routine call, and it really makes me think about how really this is exactly why we domesticated cats in the first place and maybe it's deeply ingrained in their instincts as essentially a job.

   This morning after hearing particularly insistent gnawing in the kitchen I traced it to a box of pasta I hadn't known was there (it was among some things my Russian friend had given me before evacuating last year), I quickly tried to close the box to trap the mouse but it successfully lept out.
   Ereyesterday I heard rustling from the small box I put recycling in in the kitchen. I also went to quickly pick up the box but much to my alarm I fekt something strugging against the hand I'd placed under the box -- it had been under the box. I whipped my hand away doublequick because I'm not keen at all to get infected with something by a mouse bite.

   I've been lucky on occasion though, I did successfully catch one in a box, and in a stroke of remarkable luck (good luck for me, particulary bad luck for the mouse), I heard rustling in a box of crackers, I quickly picked it up but the mouse lept out. flying through the air right into a pint glass half full of water, from which it was unable to extricate itself.

   Now many people might find this very convenient indeed, since drowning is a common method of killing mice, but it feels a bit barbaric to me. I'm actually a big softy in fact, or maybe I can blame it on my vague pseudo-buddhist philisophies, I feel I cannot kill anything _directly_, but I can feed things to other things because the circle of life. I've attempted to feed mice to Cato in the past and have wished I had a snake just to feed the mice to it (though apparently feeding live mice to snakes is illegal in Australia, which.. comeon people, in nature things eat eachother, you can't deny the cycle of life!). My current preferred method of disposing of mice is to simply place them in the greenwaste bin. If it's mostly full of stuff I dont' worry too much, but currently it's mostly empty and there's two mice living in there, and now I find myself looking around for some past-its-prime fruit or vegetables to throw out to feed the mice in the Greenwaste Gulag. It may well be that they will be crushed by a trash compactor in the greenwaste truck but, well, that's still easier on my concience than if I offed them myself.

Comments

[lookfar.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I'm a fan of the wooden snap trap. Instant death and you don't actually touch the corpse, very effective. Less cruel that being played with by a cat. Call me a cold hearted vermin hater.

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[pondhopper.livejournal.com]

If you don't want a disease-ridden home, harden your heart and put out traps. Or live-trap and release far far away because mice have a homing instinct. Not to mention that you're probably throwing away a lot of mouse-soiled food.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Oh I do have live traps out

[ravenfeather.livejournal.com]

My cats do the same "inspection" but do not catch the mice, who are active when they are not around. I use live traps, baited with peanut butter on my counter, and when I hear the "clack clack" of the door closing, I put it into a large canister until I can take it out a mile away and let it go in an oil field. I put them in the canister, because they WILL get out of the live trap in short order, so they are usually free in the canister by the time I can drive them to their new home.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah I have several live traps and similar experience, in re putting them into another canister, and I used to just release them halfway to work in normal years when it was one or two a year, but now it's one or two a week so it's just into greenwaste gulag for them.

[chocolate-frapp.livejournal.com]

ugh, I hate mice. I use glue traps because sometimes the snap traps just injure them and then they get loose and you have to deal with that. I would have a cat, I love cats but I'm super allergic to them.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah that's my concern with snap traps. I'm realizing now that I didn't mention in my entry that I do have several live traps in addition to the random capture attempts I wrote about.

[crazy-mich.livejournal.com]

I remember an ex of mine in college had a mouse problem in his mum's house. They filled a bucket with soapy water and rimmed it with peanut butter. I think there was also a little ramp so the mice could get up to the top...but then they fall in and drown. I absolutely hate the thought of killing mice but I understand it is necessary if they get in your house. I don't agree with glue traps....those seem far too torturous and I have heard horror stories of mice gnawing off their own limbs in order to escape it. I believe when we had mice at my parents house a couple times (luckily they were in the walls and floor and not actually inside the house where we were) we put poisonous food down. They would take it back to their nest and it would dry them out so they wouldn't smell. Do they have anything like that in Australia?

[picosgemeos.livejournal.com]

I had a mouse in my kitchen and was convinced by my cleaner to mix some rat poison pellets with mashed banana for it. Found it groggy in the morning, in the sink, and so decided to release it outside and let it die in the wild... not even thinking that one of my cats could find it and get poisoned — which is what happened. He disappeared for two days and we found him barely alive. Thankfully he survived. I chucked all the pellets and found out since then that it's getting banned in countries like Canada (because it kills cats as wells as owls, etc.) All of this to say that... I'm glad you don't have pellets about, for Cato's sake!

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah that's another consideration. The live capture method might not immediately solve my problem like putting out poison might have, but it works eventually (I think I still have mice at this point but the situation is much better now) without other negative consequences.

Cato is wicked smart though. I had tried to feed him one of the mice I captured, by releasing it right in front of him, but having been in the little mouse trap overnight the mouse wasn't looking very well at all, kind of slowly hobblign out and around, and Cato looked at it like "heck no I'm not eating that" — at the time I thought he was just being too picky, it hadn't even occurred to me that he might be instinctively thinking that such an unwell looking mouse might be hazardous to eat.

[magaretnahmias.livejournal.com]

Haha. Chicago in the Us was having the same problem and cats also came to the rescue

[magaretnahmias.livejournal.com]

You mentioned Chicago. Well I posted about the solution to the problem, feral cats. If you have some let me go after them. In this case, the cats are so powerful they even need to kill the rats
https://magaretnahmias.livejournal.com/33689.html