The Mice Are Ninjas

I live in an old house.

Well, shhh, don’t let the house hear me say that – she’s 119 years young. She was also moved here in 2000 from a town about an hour away. So besides the crap insulation (and by crap I mean none), single pane windows that are as thin as parchment paper, and iffy wiring that all tend to come with such an old place, there are also numerous cracks, gaps, and holes. Which essentially means it’s a critter hostel. If it flies, walks, crawls, slithers, creeps (you get the idea), my house discriminates against none and welcomes all.

Typically, it’s not so bad. I’ve learned to live with walking through delicate strands of spider silk, moths flitting around my head as I try to paint in the evening, reaching for the toilet paper only to come across a lizard staring back at me. (Yep, it happened.) So in general, we all coexist.

Cool, right? That's paint on my hands, btw, not blood.

But a couple of years ago, the inevitable finally happened:

The mice moved in.

This was before I got my cats and in fact the reason for getting the cats in the first place.
In my head, mice are in the category of ‘cute and fluffy’ so my first instinct is to get all googly eyed and start feeding them Cheerios; but unfortunately they’re terribly destructive behind the scenes and my house is already wobbly as it is. They also carry some pretty icky diseases. All the same, I absolutely cannot kill them. Poison, snap traps, glue – it’s not happening.

Cue internet search: natural fixes for mice. Let’s quickly go over the events of the next few months.

Step 1: Get kittens. Result: The kittens proceed to murder everything cute and fluffy except mice.

Step 2: Scatter peppermint oil bombs all over the house. Result: I discover I abhor the scent of peppermint. Oh and the mice don’t give a crap.

Step 3: Buy insanely strong balsam fir-scented sachets and again bomb the house. Result: The house smells like a glorious Christmas wonderland, but the mice again don’t care.

Step 4: Fox urine granules – a “guaranteed solution.” (sigh) Result: Nope. Just another nasty smell everywhere.

Step 5: Get humane catch-and-release traps and load them up with yummy cheese. Result: see for yourself.

Quick story about the traps. I bought two of them and they both went in my kitchen; one was on the countertop and the other was on the stove – both places seem to be popular mouse hang-outs judging by the poop they leave behind. If they bring coffee and donuts, they take that with them when they leave.

So the first night I put in bits of bread and a couple of pellets of dog food. (In the past, dog food was their go-to. I’d find little piles in the strangest places: inside one of my shoes in the closet, underneath a stack of shirts in a drawer, inside a dog-bone-shaped cookie cutter mold – which was actually kinda cute, but that meant they were crawling all over my silverware.)

The next morning, the stove trap was untouched, and the countertop trap still had the dog food but was missing the bread. Apparently they didn’t understand the catch-and-release concept. I’m the one that’s supposed to release them. They can’t just release themselves. That’s cheating.

So one night I upped the game. Cheese. Oh yea, I went for the cheese. I tossed the bread and dog food and loaded them up with bits of fragrant provolone. I don’t even like provolone, that’s how desperate I was. Let me just show you the result of that again.

The cheese was still there. They literally crapped on my idea. I set up my game camera, but it didn’t catch anything, which leads me to believe they are ninja mice. They slip through the night without waking the dogs or the cats, they avoid camera detection, they escape from traps. And they mock my attempts to stop them.

After several months, it was getting more and more obvious (to my utter dread and horror) that I might have to lay out poison. Seeing as how the cats had never brought in a single mouse, I was be reasonably sure they wouldn’t find and eat the guys that succumbed. But just thinking about it made me a little ill. I didn’t want mice in my house, but geez, they were simply trying to survive, just like the rest of us. I hate killing things (except scorpions and wasps and now centipedes).

So I forged ahead, adding ever yummier treats to the traps. And then one morning, lo and behold!

To be continued…