The Mouse

By popular demand, I am posting my Mouse story…

In my previous post, I told the dark tale of the rat getting caught in the mouse trap. Well, I responded to that little misadventure by going to Ace Hardware and buying RAT TRAPS. They’re like a mouse trap, but bigger. Much bigger. Take your finger off bigger.

What I learned is that catching a rat in a mouse trap is VERY DIFFERENT than catching a mouse in a rat trap.

So anyway, I screwgun my rat traps to my shed floor because I’m tired of having to go hunting for missing traps. I set my peanut butter bait, and I wait.

After a day or two, I go in the shed to see if I have had any luck.

No rats. Dang.

But I looked closer… one of the rat traps had been sprung!

Even closer still I looked. No rat. But what’s this…?

A tail! A mouse tail!

I caught a mouse tail in my rat trap!

It seems that mice are a bit too small to be killed by the big jaws of the rat trap, but they’re just long enough to get their tails snipped off at the base. I mean right at the base, next to their little butts.

So now I have a tailless mouse running around in my shed at night. Funny. At least from my perspective – I’m sure the mouse was not too amused.

Oh – and I caught TWO mice, too! That’ll teach ‘em!

The RAT

So I have this shed, see. It's the one in my previous post from some time ago. In reality, it's more like a little barn than a shed, especially since the creatures move in every fall.

Well, this fall was no exception. The mice were eating my grass seed and leaving their little calling cards all over the place, so I decided to do something about it. I set TRAPS. Not those sissy glue traps, but American made steel spring Victor traps, and I loaded them with peanut butter.

Then the funniest thing happened. I went in last night after walking the dog to check and see if I caught anything, and my traps were GONE! It took me a second, but then I realized there could be only one explanation... In addition to my little mice friends, I obviously had RATS!

I hate rats. Almost as much as I hate pigeons. I figured that a rat probably would not be killed by a mouse trap, but rather annoyed by the fact that one of his appendages was stuck and would drag the trap away until he could free himself. So I lit a lantern and went about searching for my missing traps.

Then I heard it under the lawn mower...

I called my big yellow dog in and pulled back the mower. "Get it boy!"

Sure enough - there it was with part of it stuck in the trap and apparently stuck under the mower while trying to escape. The dog grabbed it, got it out of the trap, and quickly immobilized it.

OK - one problem solved... getting the rat out of the mouse trap without getting bitten.

But now I had a live, angry rat on my hands that my dog was not willing to kill, just torture. As much as I hate rats, I do not like to see them suffer unnecessarily, so I had to find a way to kill it that was relatively humane.

For you more sensitive readers, I will skip the details, but I can say that I was able to dispatch the rat without too much unnecessary bloodshed. Afterwards, I went inside feeling like a big game hunter that just took down some dangerous beast...