Just Call Me the Grim Reaper

Every once and a while you read about some Mensa reject who managed to blow up his house by igniting too many flea foggers. I used to laugh at them. Not any more.

Now I understand. Those poor folks have been driven mad by the neverending onslaught of pests that they will literally do anything to rid their place of the plague, even if it means they may destroy their homes.

I envision the homeowner being interviewed on TV. They’re covered with soot but  gleefully proclaiming, “Yeah, the house is gone, but so are the fleas!  Winner!”

Currently I do not have a bug problem. (That sound you hear is me knocking wood, lighting a candle and doing a preventative interpretive dance.)  Actually my problem is worse. I have mice. 

Over the years I’ve grown accustomed to the occasional rodent.  My barn is within spitting distance of the house, and where there is hay and grain, there are mice.  It was never a big problem before. Usually Poppy the Brittany dispatched them quickly, and that was the end of that.

Not this year. I’m not sure if it’s the four-year drought or something else, but word seems to have spread among the mouse population that there’s good eating at the Liveten household. 

It began when I noticed Poppy staring raptly at the kitchen broiler. She sat for hours, watching intently, still as the proverbial mouse.  The next day I noticed that the cover that is supposed to protect the leather couch from dogs was rolled up. When I straightened it, a mouse fell out. It was quite dead.

I was understandable startled and a little grossed out, but I praised Poppy, picked up the mouse with a plastic bag and dumped it in the trash outside. I figured I was done.  I was so naïve.

Poppy was not. That day she was hanging out by the canary flight cage, refusing to budge. After assuring her that there was no mouse, I proudly moved the cage to show her. A mouse tore out. Unfortunately Poppy misjudged her prey and was stalking the rear of the cage while the mouse sprinted to the closet from the front.

Obviously, Poppy needed reinforcements. My cat was useless. Not only is she confined to her own room for her safety, she gave up mousing the day she moved into Chez Liveten.

Killing anything is an anathema to me. I’ve been a vegetarian for more than twenty years. I once hit a pigeon with my car and it still haunts me. But this was getting ridiculous. I kept thinking I saw mice everywhere. Maybe I was.

In general I like rodents. I had hamsters and gerbils as a kid, and I think mice are adorable. Where they belong. In their natural habitat. Which is outside.

At the store I by-passed the disgusting snap traps and the inhumane glue boards. Instead I shelled out $29 for a wee little wire have-a-heart trap. They don’t kill the animal, so you can release back to the wild.

That night I baited the trap with peanut butter (mice, apparently are fools for the stuff) and set it up in back of the bird cage and happily went to bed.  After mere moments I heard a snap.

I leaped up  and smugly ran to the kitchen. In the cage was a teeny, furious brown mouse with a glossy coat.  I may have even whistled a little as I brought it behind the barn and gently tipped the creature onto a pile of leaves.

Just to be on safe side, I set the trap up again. I caught three mice that night.  It may have even been the same mouse. They all look alike, so I can’t say for sure.

What I do know is that the by the time morning came I was a new person.  A blood thirsty one.  Cute little noses and tiny pink feet no longer had the power to move me. I wanted them dead. All of them. And their families too.

I went back to the store for weapons. I still wouldn’t buy glue traps and poison is out,  since poisoned mice go outside and can be eaten by birds or my dogs.  But I bought so many snap traps that the woman behind the register

eyed me suspiciously as if she thought I was going to sneak them in Halloween candy.  As if I’d waste precious mouse traps on children!

As soon as I got home I set them up. One in the kitchen, one in the closet and one behind the birdcage. I went to bed warmed by the thought that the mice were going to be gone from my life. I even dreamed about the little suckers.

In the morning I checked the traps carefully. The mice had somehow licked the peanut butter off and escaped the traps. I was enraged. I swear I heard the damn things laughing at me.  Apparently I was now feeding them.

Cursing loudly, I reset the traps, carefully smearing the peanut butter all over the bait surface.  This. Was. War!

That afternoon Poppy snagged another one.  Eventually I caught one in a trap. And then another. Right now about half the time I catch them, and the rest of the time they lick the trap clean. But the body count is growing.

I’m not exactly winning the war, but between Poppy and I, we’re holding our own. But honestly, if I thought a flea fogger would kill mice, I’d buy so many you’d see me on the evening news.