Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage

I am at war and the mission is not accomplished. My house is populated by mice. Their weapon of mass destruction is their large birthrate.

You would think that my years and years of overseeing dissections would make dealing with mice easy, but such is not the case. In fact, my science teaching has actually worked against me. When I first noticed a mouse in the house several months ago, I didn't think much of it. My science background told me that we share our world with many different living things, so if a little mouse wants to run across my living room and then back out through a crack every once in awhile, then it could go right ahead. My science background seems to have taught me less about what mice might do when they meet mice of the opposite sex. I blame cartoons for this. They show mice occupying homes, running from cats, and borrowing thimbles and such for furniture. They seem like nice little fellows.  Not once have I seen mating mice in a cartoon. So, life went on with the science teacher thinking that she was sharing a house with a bachelor mouse.

As time passed, I started to be aware that there were probably more mice than the one little guy. Signs of them started to appear in my bedroom, and I would hear noises coming from the dogs' food bowls when both dogs were on my lap in another room. It came to me (slowly--way too slowly) that I needed to get rid of these mice. The dogs were no help. I have actually seen them lazily watch the living room mouse run across the room. The pets had a pet of their own.  I started my internet search for ways to rid myself of the mice.

I read about how inhumane the various traps were, and declaring myself the St. Francis of the mouse world, I decided that humane traps were the way to go. I bought little traps that don't hurt the mice at all. The mice go in and the door closes, safely trapping the mouse.  Then my plan was to walk them to our local creek and wish them well.

I planted the traps and Madeline, one of my dogs, would wait for me to leave the room, grab a trap in her mouth, and run excitedly around the house. I would chase her and retrieve the trap, and she would do it all over again. Go figure. I finally found places to put them that Madeline couldn't get to, but the mice were too smart to go in.

Then I found two things that convinced me I had to go to war. I found some mouse droppings on my bed, and, horror of all horrors, they had eaten a Scharffen berger chocolate bar that I had on a shelf in my closet. It was time to stop being polite and start getting real. 

There's a lot of help available on the internet.  All seem to agree that the old-fashioned traps are cruel because they sometimes semi-kill the little rodents.  Many sites suggest the sticky papers.  They are somehow supposed to be less cruel.  I'm not sure how ethical it is to have a living thing with awareness spend its last few hours stuck to a board.  Does it starve to death or die of fear?  I couldn't use poison because I was afraid of the dogs getting into it.  How odd we are that one mammal is adored and needs to be protected from what is used to kill another.  I bought some of the sticky traps that are inside of boxes (so that you don't have to look at the horrible suffering), but the mice just walked around them, laughing.

When I talked to Cameron, he told me about an episode of This American Life called "Building a Better Mousetrap."  The title is a metaphor, but they began with a story about actual mousetraps, in which an expert says that the old fashioned spring action mousetrap is in fact the better mousetrap.  So, off to the store I went and purchased eight mousetraps.

I set up four of them in various places.  I put little bits of cheese on them.  A day passed and nothing happened.  Then, I decided that it would be just desserts to lure them with Sharffen berger chocolate.  So I set the traps and went to work.  When I got home and went to check the traps, one of them was gone.  A quick look around told me that it wasn't really gone; it had caught a mouse and the quick spring action had made the trap flip over.  This meant that I had to turn over the trap to see what had happened.  Would the mouse be only half dead?  Would it be beheaded?  The truth is that it was a very clean kill and must have been an instant death.  I still found the whole thing made me kind of queasy, but I set a new trap in the same space.  This morning, as I was in that space between being awake and being asleep, I heard a snap.  The same spot had produced another clean kill.  This time, I didn't feel so queasy.  In fact, I felt like I had accomplished something.  And the scientist had to use logic to assume that where there are two mice, there were likely many more.  I set another trap, and this time, when I got home from work, the trap was still set, but the chocolate was gone.  

The war continues.  Survival of the fittest.  Happy 200th birthday, Charles Darwin.