December, again.
The days are short; skim-ice creeps across the little pond at night; the bed groans with comforters. The propane stove in the corner of the living room bursts to life every few minutes. Comfort food bubbles away on the stove.
Seen from the outside, our old log cabin on St. Peters Church Road glows like a beacon. This is the time of year when the last of the summer creatures take a good, long look through our foggy kitchen windows — and dive right in.
Squadrons of heat-seeking houseflies are a nuisance, but cold mornings, which make them sluggish, and a well charged Dustbuster, make short work of them.
The mice are a different story. We’ve done a lot of repointing and flashing over the years to tighten up the basement, but when you’re dealing with a stone foundation that’s nearly as old as the United States, there are certain limitations. A dime-sized chink becomes a rodent superhighway.
In summertime, the living is easy. Mice prefer to sleep out in good weather. Any mouse foolish enough to seek the comforts of our home has to run a gauntlet of barn cats and red tailed hawks, not to mention a final, supreme challenge: the six-foot-long black snake who patrols our basement.
Unfortunately, our black snake is a fair-weather friend. When it’s warm, he slithers along our joists clearing mice with ruthless efficiency, but when the mercury starts heading south, he does, too, retiring to some cozy nook to hibernate, his version of a beach-front condo in Boca.
In December, when the barn cats prefer snoozing to stalking, and our fickle snake has hung out his “See You Next Spring!” sign, our house is left defenseless, at the very moment it’s dawning on legions of filthy little critters that camping is nice, but, hey, central heat is awesome.
In they come, scampering up from the basement to raid our kitchen.
This isn’t our first rodeo. Each fall, we dutifully haul out the mousetraps, deploying more and more of them as the tired year staggers to the finish line.
After a few days away from the house, while the Ladies linger out by the car, I’ll head inside solo, don the work gloves, and clear the carnage.
We used to be pretty good at dispatching mice, but lately, the mice have wised up. Exercising a truly enviable degree of self-control, they’ll scamper right past bait pedals crammed with delicious bits of cheese – or worse, working with the steadiness of WWII sappers, they’ll lick the trap clean without springing it.
In the morning, when I check the traps, those gleaming bait pedals will seem to wink at me, mocking me, baiting me – me, the trap-baiter! – to “bring it on.”
The old-school Victor snap traps just aren’t doing it anymore. And no wonder. The snap traps you can buy today are virtually identical to the very first modern mousetrap, which William C. Hooker patented in 1894.
There have been advances in mouse warfare since then, everything from poisoned baits to live-catch traps, which are meant to appeal to the soft-hearted homeowner, the one who thinks the mouse merely needs to be incarcerated for a while – for a few hours of thoughtful reflection, perhaps – in order to repent of his sinful ways.
Glue traps are quite popular, but lately they’ve been met with an outcry from animal rights people. Apparently, a glue trap isn’t “humane.” The trap doesn’t kill the mouse; it merely immobilizes him until he starves, freezes, or dies of boredom.
But for every problem, there’s a solution! A company called Rentokil Pest Control sells an electronic trap that senses when a mouse has gotten stuck in the glue. At that point, the trap seals shut and fills up with carbon dioxide, which suffocates the mouse in short order.
I am not making this up.
In 2005, PETA named the inventor of this rodent gas chamber, Dr. Nigel Binns, its “Person of the Year,” for building a more humane mousetrap.
I guess I see their point, but honestly, gassing a trapped creature in the name of “humanity” has the wrong overtones.
In fact, the more you look into the age-old conflict of man and mouse, the worse it looks for mankind. Mr. Hooker’s early traps were given “fun” names like “Out O Sight,” “Joker,” and “Knock Em Stiff.” In our own era, the latest craze is to train a light-sensitive “nanny cam” on a baited trap, and post the resulting snuff film on YouTube.
I’m not above feeling a little thrill when I bag a mouse – Ha! No more cheese for you!
I get that it’s “us” or “them.”
It’s the gloating that bothers me.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 01 December 2011
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
