There is a mouse in the room and it’s freaking me out. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. I can hear it scrabbling away behind our shelving unit, eating my Muppet DVDs and chewing holes in Amy’s paint pots. A real man would move the shelves and deal with the problem. He would pick up a handy cricket bat or golf club and give it a jolly good bashing. That’s what a real man would do.
I, however, will quietly pick up my laptop and relocate to another room.
I haven’t always been scared of mice. In fact I can trace the onset of my wariness back to an incident just three years ago. We were just about to move house and, as such. I felt morally obligated to deal with a large nest of mice that had taken up residence in our garage.
We still had our dog Holly at the time and, as she was of fine terrier stock, I theorized that she would be a fine mouse hunting companion. And to be fair, early indications certainly looked good. As soon as she caught the scent of the mice her ears pricked up, her body tensed, and she began to quiver in anticipation of the hunt. We were all set for a mouse massacre.
I must have made a magnificent sight. The mighty warrior, ready for battle, my faithful hound’s leash in one hand, a broom handle in the other.
“On my command” I bellowed “UNLEASH HELL!!” and then gave the nest site a quick kick.
What happened next still haunts me to this day. Two dozen mice exploded out of the hole, shooting off in all directions at speeds of over six hundred miles an hour. You couldn’t even see them properly, they were just streaks of randomly ricocheting grey blobs. It was like a scene out of aliens, but with significantly smaller monsters. I soon came to realize that the dog was going to be no use to whatsoever. She was very good at frantically pursuing them around the garage, but when it came to administrating the killing chomp she just stood there with a “now what?” expression on her face and then gingerly let them go.
In the end I resorted to repeatedly whacking the fleeing mice with a shovel. Have you ever squished a slow moving pregnant mouse as she desperately waddled across the floor in front of you? Well I have, and it doesn’t make you feel all that good about yourself. Scenes from Maus kept flashing past my eyes.
I can still feel the traumatic echoes of the shock of that initial mouse explosion. There is no way I’m going to risk that sort of thing happening again. So for tonight the mouse in my living room can have it’s fun nibbling my stuff and pooing on my carpet. Tomorrow I’ll go and buy some poison for it to get it’s teeth into.
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 2:14 am
We had mice…we set traps…no more mice :)
Bradley
The Egel Nest
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 2:21 am
I’m all too familiar with that chewing, gnawing sound. My mouse is a squirrel and he’s living in the attic. It’s going to be a long winter!
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 2:36 am
As I sit in this dark room, shadows being cast by the light of your blog I can hear the field mice (that regularly appear from the farm nearby) closing in on me. I could run and collect the cat to protect me… but she’s terrified of them too.
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 2:42 am
Maybe you can try this:
http://glass.typepad.com/journal/2005/09/how_to_catch_a_.html
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 3:07 am
That’s a really disturbing image.
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 3:20 am
Last year I grabbed my pair of suede workgloves from the drawer in my garage, and five little pink baby mice spilled out and were wiggling around on my workbench. I felt trapped in a moral quandary. Eventually I decided to set them “free” by putting them out behind my garage. I pretended not to know that they would die without their mother’s milk. And that our neighbor had a big cat.
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 5:34 am
We had a mouse problem once. Here is my sure fire way to trap the little suckers. 1) Bait good old-fashioned mousetraps with peanut butter. 2) At night, before you go to bed, place traps up against any archway/doorframe in the house, trap side towards the wall. 3) In morning, dispose of the many mouse carcasses you will encounter.
Mice tend to run along the walls, so this method creates a twofer…those that aren’t attracted to the peanut butter will just run right over the trap and WHAM! No more mouse. Depending on the severity of infestation, you should get most of them within a week.
Warning: pick up all mousetraps in the morning before any little human critters might see the yummy, yummy peanut butter.
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 5:35 am
When we bought our house we bought our house’s mice. Luckily there are no cat allergies in this house and we got a cat who, though it didn’t seem likely, is an excellent mouser. I saw him eat one whole
Very disgusting but very effective.
Before we got the cats we tried traps and poison. They really seemed to LOVE peanut butter.
best of luck with the varmint.
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 9:36 am
I’ll third the peanut butter baited trap method, and I think it’s a lot more humane than poisoning (and much safer if you have small kids running around, randomly eating stuff).
Set the trap(s) at night, and collect/dispose in the morning.
I’ve got one of these - it’s dead easy to set, and is very powerful - the mouse won’t even know it’s stepped on the trap.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Mouse-Snap-E-Trap-Mouse-Trap_W0QQitemZ110144781182QQihZ001QQcategoryZ75581QQcmdZViewItem
Another reason to avoid poisoning is that the mice crawl away and die, then they rot, then they smell really bad, and you can’t get to them. With a trap, you can chuck the dead mouse in the bin (or compost)
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 10:11 am
We had a mouse once in the kitchen, Brezeska had been fascinated with ‘under the cooker’ where no human dare venture for some time. We had a look - not too closely of course as grease and dust make the scariest of monsters, couldn’t see anything and just dismissed it as Brezeska being a ‘bit mad’.
Anyway one morning I went downstairs to feed Brezeska and I had not yet put on my glasses and so was working ‘blind’, I can only describe as terror the emotion I felt when I put my hand down to pick up the tin of catfood from the back of the pantry and a small dark flurry blur rushed past my hand. I screamed for all I was worth, scared the cat, scared Mr Pops who thought from my scream that I must at the very least chopped off my hand and then ran into the front room and jumped up on the sofa with my feet underneath me in a tom and jerry housewife stylee.
Mr Pops came downstairs and laughed at me, pointing out that he had seen me in a stable mucking out when a rat had scuttled over my foot and I hadn’t flinched. ‘That wasn’t in my kitchen’ I countered and we went to the shop and bought lots of humane traps, that expounding foamstuff to block up the hole we found and I bleached the kitchen from top to bottom.
Good luck with getting rid of your unwelcome visitor.
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
The bad thing with poison is the chance the mouse will die somewhere inaccessible and you’ll have to move everything out to get to the body. Hygiene, smell & even, possibly maggots will make it a necessity
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Oh my gosh. No wonder you’re traumatized. I have no practical solutions for you as my favorite mousetrap is still a hungry cat, but you have my sympathy.
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
We just left ours. We named it Geoffrey and every now and again it would come out and sit in the middle of the kitchen floor. We’d have a look at him and eventually he’d go back under the oven, fridge or wherever. Eventually he got bored and left. No more mouse problem.
on Nov 13th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
At the last-but-one house move we were clearing out the garage on the day before moving when a huge rat ran out of a box of stuff and under the decking.
“That was a big mouse” said the wife
“Er yes, it was, a big, mouse” I replied still in shock.
We pretended it hadn’t happened.
The buyers of the house sarcastically thanked us for the rat when we went around to collect some mail a week later.
We pretended that we didn’t hear them,
on Nov 14th, 2007 at 3:00 am
We get them this time of year, too. Last year, as I sat watching TV, a little bastard showed itself not 5 feet from me. A few traps with peanut butter in the attic and all is handled.
on Nov 14th, 2007 at 9:37 am
It’s worth noting that the traps will also catch voles, and anything else that tries to eat our food.
Or lagging.
Or plastic bottles.
Or wires.