Every year in the fall, all those mice living wild outside start looking for a nice warm place to spend the winter. Unfortunately for us, a lot of those mice migrate to our house. So far this year I haven’t seen any overt signs of immigrant mice, but it could still happen.
I don’t like to kill wild things, but mice can cause many problem in the house, if their population is left unchecked, so I try to deal with mice as soon as I see one. I have never seen evidence that our cat Lucifer has caught a mouse in the house, so dealing with them has been left to me.
The other day while reading through my 1995 diary, I came upon this description about having to deal with mice in the house:
I began to see mouse droppings on the stove and kitchen counter. I had been putting out the live trap (a trap that doesn’t kill the mouse, just captures it), with tempting bait (cookies, chocolate chips, cereal, etc) but the mice just wouldn’t go into it. As a last resort with not being able to catch any of them, I started putting out some “snap” traps that would kill them and the traps quickly showed results, killing two of them.
Next evening I heard another mouse making noise in the pantry, so I quietly tip-toed through the kitchen, and saw the mouse run off. Then later I heard and saw it again. This time I was able to chase the fleeing mouse, trying to hit it with a broom, but again the mouse got away.
When I later heard the mouse, it was making noise in an empty Life cereal box. I quickly closed the lid of the box, taped it shut, and drove the box a mile or so down the road to the river. There I opened it up and let puzzled mouse scramble out.
As I was writing about that in my diary, I heard one of the snap traps go off. Another mouse dead.
I would have rather have caught it in the live trap, so it could continue to live its life somewhere far away from our house, but it chose a snap trap instead of going into the live trap.
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