sweasel.com

It had occurred to me that it might be the stench from Westminster wafting down to the South Coast..

the fat princess who lies upon the sofa was once upon a time a young sleek kitteh who was dumped upon the roadside and adopted me. We lived in the country then (the nearest neighbor was a mile away kinda country) and she used to work all night to be able to show me her love in teh early morning. One time that love crawled across my face when she jumped up on the bed to deliver the gift.

don’t miss that country living shit one bit.

When I was in my early twenties and still living at home with my dad, he moved me and my sister to a duplex in an old Miami neighborhood. It was a nice place, except for one thing: it had mice. One day I noticed this stench every time I walked through the front door. None of us could figure out where it was coming from. Eventually the stench faded and was gone. Then one day, for some reason, my father looked into the bottom of a large Chinese vase that we kept by the door. He found the desiccated remains of a mouse. And my sister admitted that she had found this mouse corpse on the floor, hadn’t known what to do with it, so she put it in the vase. And didn’t bother telling any of us despite our frequent complaints about the smell. My sister was… a tad eccentric.

whoops! That anonymous was me! computer died this last weekend. friend patched it together for me. I’m headed on vacation in a couple of weeks and didn’t want to blow money on a ‘puter right now. Anyhooo….visiting my favorites, posted and went “anonymous?!”

/I just need to get a new machine

Our four semi-ferals bring us offerings on a daily basis. Today, I only got a mouse liver, but last week I got some new species of especially large mole.

Or it might have been a blind daschund, I’m not sure.

You might want to ask your doctor about a rabies vaccination if you’re going to play with mice.

I almost forgot!

When my mom was a little girl, her cat left an entire groundhog in her bed.

Now, that there’s one fine lookin’ mouse. Looks like it’s been gettin’ it’s three squares a day…

I remember we had lots of hedgehogs in our back yard in England. Those are some cute looking creatures.

Oh, man, that is so cute. . .not good. Makes me think of the 5 stiff little corpses I ejected from the traps this winter (into the compost heap. . .well, hell, nature does it, why not me?) No doubt they were equally cute. . .but they kept leaving little mouse turds all over EVERYTHING in the kitchen, and the three cats all looked at me like “mice? what mice?” Mind you–these are the cats that catch live birds in the attic and have not a clue what to do with them.

Sigh.

Can we spell “three ring circus?”

Here’s a neat trick I learned in the past 24 hours: A family of raccoons had taken up residence in the garage loft in the past few weeks. Momma must be trap-shy, because she didn’t fall for sardines or raw chicken wings (yum! how could she resist!) over the weekend.

Over the course of an hour yesterday morning, the pest control guy and I were able to round up all four kits, but not Momma, who was increasingly & ragingly pissed off and hiding behind a stack of furniture. Once we had the kits, we dropped them all in one of the Havaheart traps with the gate shut, and then bungeed the other trap to it before setting it.

This morning, presto! Four kits staring back sweetly in Trap #1 and Momma giving me a wicked evil eye in Trap #2 for having used her maternal instinct against her. The Raccoon Whisperer will be by in a few hours to drop them off in a forest far, far away.

It is very kind of you to hand-trap the little critters. I have a killkillkill policy, and recently had to take punitive action against a mouse in my kitchen. He loved the peanut butter I baited a trap with, but was so delicate in his touch that he did not spring the trap. So I took a small wad of cotton ball—about the size of an M&M—and mashed it together with more peanut butter. One tug on the cotton and it was curtains.

We lived in a centuries old cottage in Thetford. After two months there, I never saw a whole mouse. Our two cats, Lucifer and Bathsheba took care of everything but the tails and feet.

She got him! Or one much like him. I just heard a meow, turned around and saw her rolling about on his little fuzzy corpse on my carpet. I always feel bad taking them away from her, but she won’t eat them — just carry them around and play with them. I can’t risk that she’ll lose interest after shoving him under the couch or something.

I don’t have a no-kill policy, Deborah. We put down lethal traps as necessary. But I am a bit of a mousophile and I draw the line at smooshing a healthy specimen skipping around the livingroom.

When I had meeses, I had a rigorous kill policy, precisely because I knew the consequences of an injured one crawling off and dying somewhere. The smell can render a room uninhabitable for weeks. Also, mice have no sphincters and basically leave a trail of urine everywhere they go, which is a long way from what I consider hygienic.

Poop. They leave a trail of poop wherever they go. They do have some control of pee, however. At least, my pet meece always peed in the same corner.

When it’s necessary to dispatch a semi-dead mouse (or gerbil, we had both in our household as pets) verbalize your goodbyes, place the critter in a ziplock bag (with some papertowels to give it a bed) and then put it in the freezer. You’ll forget about it until you go to get the instant waffles, but the dear sweet mousie will have gone to his reward. Oh–it works with pet fish, too.

Dum dumdedum dumde dumde dumde dum.

Hmm, I thought it was pee. Not that crapping everywhere is any improvement.

Unsupervised, I found that in the rare event I trapped a mouse and it wasn’t killed outright, transecting it with one stroke of my 10″ chef’s knife worked very well. I flushed the corpses, or portions thereof, down the loo.

A blow on the neck with the edge of a shovel worked best for me. I once tried whacking one on the head with my flashlight. This was a bad method. It was rubberized, so the death took multiple blows. And it left a little asterisk of blood on the pavement that I had to walk past for days.

I got a mouse in a trap once, using peanut butter for bait. He must have liked the peanut butter, because the wham-bar got him right in the middle of the head. His eyes and ears pretty much touched after impact.

Doubt he felt a thing.

Another option: When life hands you mice … make stuffed dormouse !!

http://www.celtnet.org.uk/recipes/roman/fetch-recipe.php?rid=roman-glires

We always used peanut butter on the traps we set. It was sticky enough that there was no way the mice could steal it. At least, not the first mouse!

I know it’s late, but I’ve read this entire thread twice and I just can’t figure it out. How the hell do you get the mouse to jump in the cup like that?