Mousetraps aren’t my thing. More accurately: weren’t my thing. For the past several years, they have become my thing, though. That’s because I find myself in charge of mouse recycling.
It didn’t use to be that way. At 63 Tealwood Drive, we boys were too squeamish to take care of the odd mouse. My father, the softy who reportedly cried when his comrades were killed during a German attack in World War II (the fellow soldier who recorded this felt that made him a bad soldier – I thought it showed his humanity), left this kind of work to my mother.
She was the outdoorsy one anyhow. She fished and hunted, mentored by my grandfather. She plucked the Mallards and Wood Ducks they shot. She taught us baseball, football and swimming. And she took us shooting at the Olin Mathieson range in East Alton. By default (and we males were the defaulters in this case) she also handled the mice.
In those days, the traps were dangerous, and not only to the rodents. These were the old wooden snap-traps. Having positioned the cheese on the trigger platform, you had to force the killing bar back and position the hold-down bar without endangering your fingers. And then you had to put the thing down. In case of success (for you, not the mouse), there was the question of disposal. I remember some blood and guts were involved, and that strengthened my resolve not to be involved myself.
For a long stretch, after I had moved out, mice were not on the agenda. Then we came to Canada and built the cottage on Anchor Island. You’d think that, on an island, the numbers of critters would be limited. You’d be wrong. In the Canadian winter, no island is an island. We found evidence of wolf-killed deer on the island after we returned in the spring. There were moles and voles and red squirrels, too. And of course mice.
Once, when we opened up the cottage in May, Janet sniffed loudly. “There’s something dead in here.” It was still pretty cool in May, and I really didn’t smell anything (or didn’t want to). So I went about my work transporting things from the dock up to the cottage. “I’m telling you, something’s really ripe,” she insisted.
We found it in the toilet. Somehow, we had forgotten to put down the lid when we closed up the cottage in the fall. I can’t remember if we had left the critters a “present” in the form of mouse bait – I think that came later, after we had found nests of Kleenex in some of the chests. In any case, the ex-animal in the toilet was so far gone that it was not possible to identify it. Not even by smell. Janet, being the Northerner and bush denizen, took over and disposed of it. I stayed as far away as possible.
Later in our life on the island, a family of red squirrels managed to eat their way into the cottage’s double roof, making a nice cozy place to raise a family among the insulation. We could hear them running around over our heads. The time had come for me to show I could do dirty work, too.
The problem was, I wasn’t into the creation or disposal of corpses. I’d shown this when the beaver whose lodge was on the island started taking trees very close to the cottage. One evening, while doing the dishes, I watched a sapling march past, nearly upright, on its way to the water.
What to do? Janet’s father referred me to the local game warden. He explained that trapping was not an option, as the trapper with that area had already taken his limit of beaver from the lodge. He suggested I borrow my father-in-law’s rifle and take care of the problem that way. “Should I tell you when it’s done?” I asked naively. “You and I haven’t talked and I don’t want to know anything about it,” came the predictable reply.
In the event, I did borrow a .22 (familiar from those Olin Mathieson days and my exploits on the Country Day rifle team) and a few rounds of ammunition, but I couldn’t pull the trigger. The only time I ever did was pheasant hunting with Gramp, Mom, and Uncle Jack at a pheasant farm in Illinois. I decided then that, as with Mom’s ducks, the birds were more beautiful alive than dead. So I didn’t eat the one I shot, and I haven’t shot at living things since then.
Instead of nailing the beaver, I nailed chicken wire around the trees beavers seemed to favor on the island. Eventually the beavers moved on, and except for one short spell, they haven’t been back. The den on the bank is still visible, but it’s been vacant for many a year.
When the squirrels showed their hand and handiwork, I knew what to do. I went right out and bought a “Havahart” live trap from Canadian Tire. Our neighbor on the mainland, Jenn Levean, told me that Skippy Crunchy Peanut Butter was the only thing, so I put some on a cracker, set the trap, and waited. It didn’t take long for success. I ended up trapping eight animals before I decided the roof space was empty and the gnaw-holes ready to be wired shut.
Whenever I caught a squirrel, I would take the trap down to the boat and motor over to a cove on the far mainland. And then I would try to release the little bastard. Squirrels don’t like being caught, but they also tend to resist being released. The animals would cling to the cage and I would often have to tip it and prod it gently so it could go find a new home. Whether this was doing the squirrel a favor, I don’t know. Being free in a new and unfamiliar territory might not be conducive to longevity (such as it is for red squirrels). On the other hand, it was conducive to my having a clear conscience.
Jenn, on the other hand, was outraged. When I thanked her for her advice on the bait, and told her about releasing the captives, she couldn’t believe it. “You did what? They’ll just come back over here and eat my garden,” she enlightened me. “You have to drown the little bastards.”
Drowning was out of the question, although I did have to drown the empty cage once the squirrels were released, since captivity seemed to have a laxative effect: being “scared shitless” is not just a metaphor.
Here at the house on the mainland, we had mice from day one. The construction crew blamed it on openings left during the construction process, but assured us that the foundation, built with insulated concrete forms, would not have any cracks. Once we eliminated the founding generation, the problem would be over.
Despite my putting up chicken wire and foaming presumed points of entrance, they kept coming. Somehow, I had morphed into the critter guy, but I was still not into killing. We started with live traps that would sometimes get up to three mice at a time.
I read up on these mice. They weren’t city mice, and the weren’t the meadow voles we saw on the island. They were Deer Mice (Peromyscus sp.), so-called because of their beautiful deer-like coloring, they were immune to the sonic devices that claimed they would keep house mice out, and they were known to carry Hantavirus among other nasty things.
So being careful, gloved and masked, I would transport the captured mice several kilometers away and release them. They pooped too, but they needed no encouragement to depart. The problem with catch-and-release, when it comes to mice, is that you never know if they are making their way back to the house almost as fast you do. The mice kept coming; I kept catching and ferrying them.
At some point, my resolve changed. Maybe I just got tired of the fact that I seemed to be the one on the treadmill. Anyhow, we switched to poison, as we had at the cottage. Warfarin is a blood thinner, and apparently it dehydrates the animals so that they seek water. Was that the fate of the animal in the cottage? The idea is that the animals, once poisoned, will vacate the house in search of water and die conveniently out of sight and smell.
Except there’s not only no evidence they do that, but we had irrefutable counter-evidence (of sight and smell) that they don’t. And then there was the problem of poisoned mice out in the environment. I didn’t want to be contributing poisoned food for the ravens, foxes, and other predators and scavengers to find.
So we stopped the bait. And switched to dead-trapping. But not with those old wooden finger-snappers. And not with the low-tech homemade traps that folks around here favor for hunt-camps, for example. They take a large bucket or plastic container, fit a wire across the top around which an old soft-drink can rotates, smear a bit of peanut butter on the can, provide a walk-up ramp, fill the container with water or (in the case of hunt-camps that might be used only intermittently) environmental antifreeze, and wait for the mice to march up the ramp, spin out on the can, and flip into the water to drown.
This is ingenious. But it poses a number of problems. First, you still have to dispose of the little corpses. And if they’re as far gone as the animal in the cottage toilet, this will not be pleasant or tidy. Second, if you use propylene glycol (“environmental antifreeze”) to stop or mask the smell, anything eating the corpse may still be adversely affected. Third, you then have to find a responsible way to dispose of the antifreeze. And fourth, softy that I am, I don’t like the idea of a less-than-instant death for the mice.
Now we’re using those modern plastic traps which are easily and safely set and can be reused (even without rebaiting, practice shows) many times. The traps we use seem to have enough spring tension to kill the critters, but not enough to splatter them. I just pick up the trap, carry it outside, and in a practiced swing, flip the dead mice into the bush. The parabola they describe is uplifting, but like the officer flung out by the trap-like machine in Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, they quickly return to earth without having attained heaven or enlightenment.
On the other hand, their new “groundedness” provides a quick and easy form of recycling. It’s a consummation that, even if not devoutly to be wished, is as inevitable for mice as it is for men.
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