A Mouse!

by Rob English

One night a few weeks ago when my house was quiet, I happened to surprise a little mouse scouting my kitchen. For a number of reasons that you can guess, I don’t want a mouse in my house. With that in mind, I don’t leave food out, so it’s very rare for me to get any little murine (mousey) visitors. However, mice can sense that winter is coming, and instinct sends them into our homes sniffing for warm accommodations and maybe a crumb of free food. In the event, at my house that night, the mouse ran around a corner and disappeared.

I set a trap for it. They make mouse-sized humane traps now. Internet stores offer several types, while Internet do-it-yourselfer pages offer clever ways to use common household items such as empty paper towel tubes and buckets to humanely catch mice (there are cruel trapping methods such as back-breaking snap traps or sadistic glue traps, but they should be illegal). I had a humane trap handy, so I loaded it with peanut butter and set it in the cupboard under my kitchen sink.

Now, the thing about a humane trap is you have to check it every day. If you just set one in a quiet, unseen place, a forgotten, trapped mouse could die of …let’s just say loneliness, which would negate the humane aspect of the trap. But if the mouse doesn’t enter the trap for a few days, you might forget the trap is there, maybe with a desperate mouse inside.

So, how did I remind myself to check the trap every morning? Here’s how: I put a half peanut on the floor outside the cupboard. If it was gone in the morning, I’d know the mouse had come, and I would check the trap. And if the peanut was still there, I’d notice that too, and it would remind me to check.

On the third morning I checked the trap and saw that it had sprung. Mouse caught! I took the trap, with the mouse inside it, to a side garden and opened it and gently shook the mouse out in a spot where it wouldn’t be noticed by a stray cat or a hungry crow. For a minute I thought he or she had passed away already because although it landed on it’s feet, it didn’t move right away. But soon it shook off it’s fright and shock and scurried off deeper into the garden, hopefully to find a nesting place in the warm interior of a hollow log.

Photo of mouse near a tree trunk by Nico Becker and photo of a brown rodent by Denitsa Kireva from pexels.com

Rob English is a member of People for Animal Rights, a grassroots organization in Central New York,
Contact People for Animal Rights
PO Box # 401,
Cleveland, NY 13042
peopleforanimalrightsofcny@gmail.com
https://parcny.org/