I was sitting on the couch minding my own business, when I saw a black furry thing run across the kitchen floor. Being intelligent as I am, I thought it must be a mouse. First things first, I blocked the kitchen doorway so that the little rodent could not escape and hide in my bed. (Telling this part of the story later made people laugh. They informed me that mice can climb, especially up a carpeted cat condo...)
My next order of business was to put on some shoes because I was not feeling up to playing footsie with a mouse.
What to do? How can I catch this mouse when it is so small and obviously hiding behind/beneath the refrigerator? The CAT! Yes! It was finally time for Norah to shine. I shook her jar of treats to call her out of hiding and when she came I didn’t give her any to make sure that the beast was hungry for her prey.
I then proceeded to shove the cat in every corner of our small kitchen. I pushed her in the crack between the fridge and the wall, the fridge and the stove, and I even took out the drawer under the stove and put her under there! Did she help me out? NO! She found some lost toys of hers that had disappeared under the stove and proceeded to play with them while periodically looking at me with a smirk on her furry face. USELESS!
By now it was time for me to go to work and I still had not located the vermin. I called Matt at work to tell him of the intruder and alert him to the barricade I had set up in the kitchen.
While I was at work the mouse had made another cameo so at least I knew it was not a hallucination. Matt was busy researching how to catch a mouse on the internet. On my way home from work I stopped at the local Wal-mart and picked up a package of glue pad mouse traps along with some food for Milo, the legal immigrant vermin.
When I got home I found Matt on the kitchen floor with a bucket of water and an empty fridge pack of coke balanced on the kitchen stool. Needless to say, we set up the glue-pad traps and left it at that. We went to bed with the kitchen blocked off and the cat by our feet for protection.
THE NEXT DAY.....
The next morning the mouse was no where to be found, especially in the bucket or stuck to a glue trap. He made no appearances all day and all evening. Matt called me at work to say that he realized something. There is a door located behind our refrigerator (don’t ask) and that door stands about 1.5 inches off the floor, plenty of room for a small mouse to make an escape. Yay! He could be anywhere in the house by now!
I was driving home, thinking about all the places that a little mouse could hide when Matt called me. “I’ve got it!” he yelled in to the phone, “come home NOW!”
When I got home Matt met me at the front door holding a grocery bag with the tips of his fingers. “Now what?” he asked. Well, I hadn’t really thought that far. We decided that we could let him go in the park a block over from our apartment. We walked over and then Matt decided that this park was too close to home and that the mouse could find his way home. It would only have to cross the park, a street, and four yards to come “home” but it was still too close for Matt’s comfort. So, we walked to the next park over and attempted to set the little guy free beneath a tree.
Easier said than done. I am now of the opinion that a glue trap is less humane than a “snap their neck” traditional trap. That poor little guy was stuck on his side and squirming to save his life. I love animals and teared up at the sight of him. Matt, who is even more compassionate than I am, had to use another plastic bag to try and grab the little bugger. It was a futile effort. The bag stuck, the mouse got more stuck, and I got increasingly upset.
We came to the conclusion that there was no saving this mouse and that we needed to put him out of his misery. While standing in the middle of a public part, Matt and I, were thinking up ways to end his life. Some of our ideas were to run it over with the car, suffocate it in the plastic bag, or drown it in the bucket of water at home. We chose drowning as our humane method, but didn’t want to have to do it in our kitchen.
We walked over to a puddle in this PUBLIC park and drowned the mouse stuck to the glue trap. It was early evening and there were nice couples out walking their dogs while Matt and I were involved in a murder. We said a few apologetic words for the mouse before doing it and asked it’s forgiveness. We told him that we were only trying to get him out of our house and that we thought that we could set him free but that now we wanted him to have peace.
Three minutes later we walked back the half mile to our house, Matt carrying a wet grocery bag with the mouse carcass in it. We double bagged him and put it in the trash so that we wouldn’t have to call Animal Control.
We’re sorry, little friend, but let it be a lesson to all mice out there. Our house may be a circus, but animal positions have already been filled with a rabbit and a useless feline.
