Meeces

[poliphilo]

I went in the bathroom last night and a tiny, dark hallucination went streaking across the floor. "Ach, that's what comes of staying up too late staring at the monitor," I thought, but then the hallucination, instead of disappearing, started running round and round in circles and I had time to identify it. A mouse. Finally it quit panicking and ran to the corner and hid. And here's something I didn't know before- mice don't realise they have tails. I located it behind the toilet cleaner and it bolted behind the toilet pedestal and every hiding place it chose it forgot to tuck its tail in. After a while I gave up trying to catch it and just opened the bathroom door and invited it to find its own way out.

I'm torn between "how cute" and "oh drat".

I told Ailz this morning. She proposes getting a batch of these plug-in doodads she's seen advertised that emit a ultra-sound screetch that mice can't abide. A sort of Pied Piper effect in reverse.

P.S. Since I wrote the above, Ailz has been looking on-line and she finds that the screetching doodads also disgust spiders. What, drive out our lucky spiders that catch the flies? No way! So we need to do a rethink. I propose humane traps. Then I can take the meeces out the back and let them loose in the long grass. I absolutely refuse to kill them.

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

The humane traps work well, and you give them a fresh start in life!

I once trapped nineteen mice in a single winter.

(Or the same mouse nineteen times, says Kate.)

No, really! They were all different colors--some had gray round ears, some had brown ears, some had curly fur--and I got to see them up close, because I had a small relationship with each one that lasted from the moment I discovered them in their traps until I carried them across the road into the vacant lot and opened the trapdoor with a stick.

"Go! Hurry up!" I invariably said. Some of them would hang back, some would dash right off.

And they all got a nice meal, too--they LOVE peanut butter on crackers. Better than cheese!

I vote for the humane traps. Also, I worry about those sonic emitters: what if, on a very deep level, you can react to them yourself, and don't know it? Maybe you find yourself tensing up and not knowing why!

Not worth testing it. Besides, it might be like torture to--say, moths.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We'll see how it goes.

Maybe this particular mouse was a aberration- a country mouse who had strolled in from the great outdoors and, once evicted from the bathroom, was only too glad to hurry back to his native pastures.

I haven't had this problem before. In the past the only mice who have ever showed up have been the ones the cats brought in- usually well chewed.