We have a mouse problem at the Stier house…and I ain’t talking Mickey.
It all started a week or so ago when my wife and I were chillin’ and we saw something dart from the fireplace to behind the couch. So being the concerned husband that I am (okay I just really wanted to catch a mouse) I went to the store and got some mousetraps. There were three kinds to choose from:
1. Snap Traps: time tested, quick, deadly and the possibility of seeing Fivol go bye-bye with style, in a snap if you will.
2. Glue Pads: very effective, very sticky, and the mouse is very alive when you pick up the pad and take it outside then take a rock and, well, you know…smash it for Jesus.
3. Catch-em-live contraptions: These weird, little black tubes are hard to describe. You put peanut butter on the inside of one side and set it up against a floor board. When the mouse goes inside to get the yummy yummy on the other side of the tube their tiny mouse weight triggers a door that closes off the one open side. What’s the upside of these little inventions? You got a live mouse. Downside? You got a live mouse.
My wife (who adores animals of every shape and size and could win the PETA animal lover of the year award if they had one) talked me into not getting glue pads. She wanted me to go with the catch-em-live tubes of non death. So I split the difference between her desire to keep the circle of life spinning and my more top-of-the-food chain instincts of instant extinction. I bought eight snap traps and two tubes of life.
The Results?
Snap traps 1…Tubes of Life…3 (4 if you count the one that I caught but didn’t know that I caught until I opened it up and it catapulted out of the tube, over my finger, into the air and out into the garage.)
I’ve come to realize that the snap traps are not all that they are cracked up to be. I have eight of those suckers out and they don’t seem to work all that well. As a matter of fact I have to keep reloading them with peanut butter and/or mouse “attractant” (which is probably reprocessed peanut butter with blue dye number whatever) but the mice keep eating the goodies without triggering the snapper. The problem? Either really smart mice or really bad traps.
To be honest I wasn’t a catch and release kind of guy. I’m not a big fan of the “animals have rights too” attitude that is prevalent today. It’s weird to me that you can go to jail for breaking an Eagle’s egg but not for murdering an unborn child. Not that I believe you should be needlessly cruel to animals. When I go hunting (which is not that often) I don’t aim to maim, I shoot to kill and I eat the meat of the animal that I shot. If I see someone beating a dog I say something. If I see a wandering dog in our neighborhood I catch it and try to get it back to its owner. I even once stopped my car to put a wounded squirrel out of it’s misery. It had been hit by a car and was flopping around. It died before I got there with my boots of justice and mercy.
But the one snap trap that did work didn’t work right away. The mouse that got snapped wasn’t killed at first. As a matter of fact we couldn’t find the mousetrap because he had dragged it aways away before he died. To be honest I felt kind of bad. Mickey looked ickey by the time Jeremy and I found him.
So, much to my wife’s surprise, I’m now a catch and release them into the wild kind of guy now. It’s a fun family activity.
Got to go. We’re about to watch Ratatouille.
