I had to kill a tiny mouse today. Yesterday it kept scrambling across the back of my desk, peeking out from around my monitor, and I could hear it gnawing on things it shouldn’t be gnawing on.
I hate snuffing out their little lives, or adding any measure of suffering to this world. But left alone, they leave droppings all over and can gnaw through a home’s electrical wiring.
This one was too small for a quick-kill trap, so I had to set out a glue trap overnight, and this morning take the stuck, panicking little thing outside for execution. And I’m left grieving its short, innocent time on this earth.
This is not how I would make a world. If there’s an intelligent design behind it, I’m unimpressed.
As an elegy, let me borrow some words from Robert Burns:
“But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
“Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!”
If I could, I would leave the rodents alone and just clean up the droppings when I found them. But the presence of the droppings carries the risk of hantavirus, so they have to be removed.
If you’re lucky and you find a spot where the mice always travel, a live capture trap might work. You just have to remember to check it every day, otherwise death by dehydration is probably worse than being crushed in a glue trap.
One of my kids has pet domesticated rats, and they are astoundingly cute. It makes disposing of the captured mice even harder.