Of Mice & a man

Lately I’ve been having a problem with mice in my house. It’s nothing new and I’ve become accustomed to dealing with their occasional incursions over the years. In fact I’m used to all sorts of wildlife living with me on the eastern most outskirts of metro Denver. I literally live in the last urban neighborhood before the landscape abruptly becomes a prairie and as a result some of my neighbors include; deer, foxes, raccoons, prairie dogs, snakes, eagles, skunks, coyotes, owls, rabbits, hawks, some weird people that appear to live like animals, and of course, lots and lots of field mice.

Scratching on the outer side of walls and ceilings are the first tell tale signs of a mouse intrusion. This doesn’t bother me too much because they’re separated from my existence, so to speak, by some drywall and insulation. And they're easily killed by throwing some poison blocks and pellets into the attic and crawl space of my house. Only downside is if they die near the heating coils that run through the ceiling sheetrock, a bad smell lingers for about a week. This is one of many drawbacks of having electric radiant heat instead of a forced-air duct system. I suspect this and the poor efficiency of having heat come from the ceiling (heat rises right?) is the reason why radiant coils are so unpopular nowadays. Additional perks include stupidly high electricity costs and about five feet of insulation in my attic that’s perfect for mice looking for warmth in the cold months. This is all bad for sure, but once they decide to join me in my living space, I start to really get agitated. When I see mouse droppings – there are very few places a mouse cannot get into – and hear them running around and squeaking in adjacent rooms, I get super pissed! Plus those droppings have the strong potential of carrying Hantavirus – a nasty, nasty sickness that can potentially be fatal in rare cases – which is transmitted through their feces and urine, and can become airborne if the droppings aren’t sterilized before sweeping them up. Anyway, through the years I’ve used every kind of mouse extermination system possible, including the human exterminator man type. When I first had this problem and couldn’t get rid of the mice on my own as I was still an apprentice mouse killer, I called one of these companies to do it for me only to realize that all they did was put down glue traps that I could buy for a lot cheaper, and spray some kind of stuff along the wall, that as far as I could tell was good for one thing: Nothing. And since ‘Nothing’ was not the result I was hoping for, I took matters into my own hands.

First off, I never bought a glue trap because I saw the results from the one the exterminator left. Basically the mouse is going about his business when he mistakenly walks over one of these glue traps and is marooned there for the rest of his life. The mouse either starves to death, suffocates in glue, or in the case of the one in my house, is gnawed on by other mice! I remember being shocked that mice would eat one of their own. I felt so bad for this poor creature that was bloodied with bite marks and probably starving that I tried to get him out of the glue and save him, but as I tried and tried I realized that freeing him would’ve meant tearing him in two. So I decided to end his slow misery by killing him effectively and fast. I put him and the glue trap that was now a part of him forever in a plastic grocery bag and backed over it all with my truck.

Mouse traps are pretty effective, but for me, they increase my anxiety level in a bad way because the sound of traps snapping in another room and the sometimes loud crying squeak of a mouse that isn’t completely dead but severely injured bothers me to the extreme. I hate to see anything suffer; and I mean anything – insects, animals, people (although I must admit, my tolerance for extremely vile humans that suffer is a lot higher than any animal), and mice – basically anything with consciousness and the capacity to feel pain. Now don’t get me wrong here, I believe in the food chain and killing for food, raising livestock and even hunting is good to control animal populations. I have no problem with theses scenarios, as long as it’s done in a humane way where the creature being killed does not suffer or it’s at least minimized as much as possible. In my outlook nothing should have to suffer. When humans get a thrill out of suffering as in blood sports, recreational and trophy hunting, or torture; it is sadistic, evil, and about the worst thing a conscious being could do to another.

As I said earlier, I’ve used poison, which in uh, respect to the last paragraph is a complete hypocritical contradiction. The poison constricts blood vessels and eventually dehydrates the mouse. I feel bad for doing this and yet, I know the mouse feels a helluva lot worse! So why do I do it? Is it because I’m higher on the food chain or that I like to think I’m smarter than the mice by outsmarting them? Nope. And in fact I’m only smarter than them in a human-centered way. They’ve got me beat when it comes to their mousey intelligence employing superior olfactory sensitivity and ultrasonic hearing. So I guess the answer is; because I can kill; and I’ll do just about anything to rid my house of these innocent but annoying creatures. An embarrassing paradox for sure! The mice are just doing what they got to do, just like I go to work for money and then buy food. I’ve rationalized this to myself over and over, and always end up at the inhumane level of causing a fellow mammal to suffer a slow death. I think of Jack Kerouac living as a fire lookout in an elevated cabin in the mountains of Washington in his book, Desolation Angels. He had a mice problem too but couldn’t bring himself to kill them. He ended up just living with and tolerating it as a insignificant nuisance. Jack is more of a man than me because I just can’t afford to be competing for living space with mice even though there’s plenty of it for the both of us. I wrestle with this jacked up dichotomy of having two opposing opinions while laying out chunks of poison. I guess in the end, however bothered and tormented I may become, I’m just going to go with the best form of killing that’s most beneficial to myself.

However, just when this false sense of self was at its nadir, a pulsating LED beacon of hope guided me through the dark rows of rodent killing mechanisms in the aisles of Home Depot. Yes, at the end of the rainbow was a Mouse Chaser. And “no,” the hardware outlet had not started selling cats. In all my years as a journeyman mouse slayer, I’d never heard or seen anything like this before! So maybe I wasn’t the pro I’d been thinking I was and had just become routinely blind through my monotonous genocidal behavior. Clearly I hadn’t taken any continuing education courses in rodent killing lately because this box seemed like it was something out of the future – even though it kinda resembled an air freshener. Basically this little device plugs into an outlet and functions by sending out continuous ultrasonic sound waves that are annoyingly ear shattering to mice. It’s like a dog whistle in that humans can’t hear it (neither can dogs and cats. The package says only small rodents can hear its shriek.) and instead of drawing a dog to the whistler, it chases the mice away to a radius of 2k sq ft. Awesome! So after spending 25 bucks, I have this magic box that will give me and the mice some peace of mind. If this thing does what it says I’ll be able to get my conscious back – hopefully.