Kill Them All - followed by maniacal laughter!

I love animals, bugs, spiders and fairly much anything that can’t kill me.  I have rescued spiders from the shower, bees who get confused in my office, helped dogs, cats, birds, snails and snakes.  I also love mice, they are cute, grey and have super cool little black beady eyes, but I don’t love them when they come and frolic and try and nest in my kitchen.  Then the OCD part of me comes out and I rant and rave about disease, foulness being spread and how sooooo not fucking okay this is!

A few weeks ago I discovered mice in the pantry.  They had very kindly run across the top of any can and decorated it with their feces, had busted into cereal boxes, crackers, rice, pasta - you name it, scattering it everywhere and leaving little traces of their frolic.  I imagine they were very happy as it was a continual feast for them.  When I went to grab a Tupperware to put leftovers away in and saw that they had been using it as their own little personal toilet corner all hell broke lose!  As I was standing there having my own private temper tantrum whilst glaring at a chewed box of Multigrain Cheerios I watched a little mouse scamper up and over the Basmati Rice, take a left turn at the Quinoa and dive behind a can of chick peas!  Are you serious?  That was just plain rude!

Everything was hauled out of the pantry (and it’s a rather large pantry).  All Tupperware were run through the “seek and destroy bugs” cycle and anything that the little grey beasties had played in was thrown out.  The cans were all washed and the tops were bleached.  The shelves of the pantry were bleached down and the herbs were rescued.  Do you know how expensive Saffron is little one?  Grrrrrrrrr.  Then someone very kindly suggested I should get a cat.  HA!

I have a lovely large grey long haired cat called Hebe who is convinced she is an Empress, thus mice, dogs, humans - fairly much anything that moves in the house is below her attention unless it has the capacity to feed her or stroke her when she deigns to be stroked.  Thus, mouse catching is not high on her agenda as it is far easy to yowl at a two legged creature who will immediately stick their hand in a bag and produce yummy kibble for her, even if she has vomited up a hairball on their laptop keyboard.

All the kitchen counters and chunks of the floor were soon covered with refugees from the pantry seeking a safe place to hide where they wouldn’t be nibbled, peed in or on, or possibly scampered across and pooped on.  My boys navigated the maze of boxes, bags of grains and tupperware that had become the kitchen with a fair amount of grace.  Glancing at the barren pantry with baleful eyes wondering if they were going to be asked to deal with the chaos that had ensued.  

I had recommendations from friends about “live trapping” and looked at them with a “Are you out of your frigging mind kind of look.”  These babies are going down!  There is no live trapping, there is no relocating them outside, there is no chanting over them in the hopes that they move on somewhere else - the kitchen is a NO GO AREA!  So those wonderful old style wooden traps were bought, if I were smart I would have bought them in bulk!  They were baited with organic peanut butter and the bag of chocolate chips that they had gnawed their way into earlier.  Like a strategic General I carefully placed my troops of wooden traps whilst flanking them with cans and the odd piece of Tupperware, after all I didn’t want to make it too obvious.  Over the last 10 days 22 mice have met their demise I am sorry to say.  As I would pull the trap out of the pantry a little blessing was said and the body was released to higher, kinder place before I lined up the traps and baited them all again.  Is this cruel?  I don’t believe so. 

Think about it.  If you had a person, situation or relationship in your life that was causing you huge damage, cost and had the potential to kill you with their shit, how long would you keep them in your life?  Hopefully not too frigging long!  

Also, on that note, hopefully you don’t set a trap for them and crush their neck, that’s a bad idea! Instead you would look and say to yourself - This isn’t working for me, I don’t feel comfie, this has to stop and what can I personally do to create change.  Then you take action (key point).  I could have sat and thought about the mice and had them drive me bonkers for far longer, but that situation didn’t work for me, so action happened and solution is still resolving.  

On a side note I have giggled a few times as none of my boys have been willing to empty a trap, instead they would rather throw the whole thing out!  Hmmmm, do I need to take with them about avoidance?