How do we nab a cute little critter?
A few days ago, my husband heard some loud gnawing behind our stove. He said that it sounded like something was trying to chew its way into the house from outside. We suspected a rat.
My hubby pulled the stove away from the wall and shone his flashlight down to the floor. There was no hole and no rat. Only a tiny mouse with shiny black eyes and big ears stared up at him, then resumed chewing on a large hunk of discarded cheese. My husband thought it looked adorable.
The cheese is now gone. The mouse isn’t.
I went to Canadian Tire and bought a product called Mouse Inn, which ensures “a gentle catch.” On the box, it shows a smiling mouse lounging in an easy chair, with feet up on a stool and a lamp in the corner. I liked this image; it’s better than seeing a mouse convulsing under the bar of a mousetrap before it dies.
I promote the notion of a peaceful death – or preferably, no death at all. The Mouse Inn, a small, rectangular plastic compartment with a one-way trap door, comes with some valerian pills, an herbal sedative that is supposed to put the mouse to sleep. One pill, one dozing mouse, which you can then relocate.
We tried it. It didn’t work.
The mouse got into our bottom shelf of seedlings indoors, devouring sweet pea seeds in a dozen peat disks. My husband considered this a travesty. This meant war on mice. . . well, maybe just a minor skirmish.
He has now baited the Mouse Inn with not only a valerian pill, but a giant piece of Black Diamond yellow cheddar. I will keep you posted . . . The two stray cats we’ve been feeding outdoors have not yet caught the little critter. Hopefully, we won’t have to resort to the extreme methods demonstrated by Christopher Walken and Nathan Lane in the 1997 movie Mousehunt.
In other mouse news, while in a dollar store recently on Commercial Drive in Vancouver, BC, I saw a mouse scurry across the floor in front of me, then make a sharp turn down one of the aisles. It was going so fast that it lost traction on the linoleum floor and skidded, just like in a cartoon. I laughed to myself, grateful that the two young boys near me hadn’t seen it.
An afterthought: I lived in the country for more than 10 years before having a mouse indoors. I find that ironic since almost every place I lived in Vancouver over a 30-year-period had mice. I have lots of mice stories. Maybe I’ll make this a series.
Got a mouse story? Why not share it here?
April 14, 2012 at 2:38 pm Comment (1)