on a dead mouse in the basement
Sep. 23rd, 2007 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingThe high point (or low point, depending on whether ickiness outweighs novelty) of yesterday was when I found a dead mouse in the basement at work.
I'd gone down around 2:30pm to bring up coffee supplies (cups, filters, lids, half-and-half, etc.), and something smelled musty and peculiar. I couldn't place the smell for a while, and then I realized it was almost identical to the smell of a chipmunk that spent a couple days decomposing under the back step at the cabin. So I figured there was a dead mouse somewhere downstairs.
When I went back down to clean and refill the humidifier in the basement humidor, I looked for the mouse again and discovered it pinned in a trap on one of the shelves near the spare napkins. It hadn't been dead too long, since its eyes were still intact and it wasn't swarming with bugs, but it had definitely been dead long enough to reek to high heaven.
I took the trap and mouse upstairs, wrapped my hand in paper towels and pulled the mouse out of the trap, tied it up inside a couple plastic bags (in an attempt to trap the smell), and then scrubbed both the trap and the shelf where the trap had been, because the wood reeked as well.
It was a cute mouse, all soft and small and gray, and I felt bad about how it had been crushed nearly in half, and the way its tail dangled like a limp accusation, but you know, mice aren't good indoors. They get into the cappuccino powder and the foreign candy, and they're bad for sanitation. I'd prefer if we had non-lethal traps, but I don't know where to get those. And anyway, everything dies eventually.
...
Still. It's a pity.
I'd gone down around 2:30pm to bring up coffee supplies (cups, filters, lids, half-and-half, etc.), and something smelled musty and peculiar. I couldn't place the smell for a while, and then I realized it was almost identical to the smell of a chipmunk that spent a couple days decomposing under the back step at the cabin. So I figured there was a dead mouse somewhere downstairs.
When I went back down to clean and refill the humidifier in the basement humidor, I looked for the mouse again and discovered it pinned in a trap on one of the shelves near the spare napkins. It hadn't been dead too long, since its eyes were still intact and it wasn't swarming with bugs, but it had definitely been dead long enough to reek to high heaven.
I took the trap and mouse upstairs, wrapped my hand in paper towels and pulled the mouse out of the trap, tied it up inside a couple plastic bags (in an attempt to trap the smell), and then scrubbed both the trap and the shelf where the trap had been, because the wood reeked as well.
It was a cute mouse, all soft and small and gray, and I felt bad about how it had been crushed nearly in half, and the way its tail dangled like a limp accusation, but you know, mice aren't good indoors. They get into the cappuccino powder and the foreign candy, and they're bad for sanitation. I'd prefer if we had non-lethal traps, but I don't know where to get those. And anyway, everything dies eventually.
...
Still. It's a pity.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-23 06:16 pm (UTC)They work like magic. You put a little peanut butter inside a milk jug lid inside the tin cat and you just wait and listen for the SNAP-scrabblescrabblescrabble noise meaning it got past the entrance ramp that shut behind it and now it's scampering around inside sniffing at the peanut butter. (In my apartment this tended to happen around 5 am... mouse eviction at 5 am in the middle of winter is not so entertaining, but oh well.)
Once in a while they die of fright on you before you can get them back out of the trap, but most of the ones I caught survived their transplanting. (Actually, I suspect I caught the same one at least three times, because I didn't know how far you were supposed to take them away; I took it a few blocks away the first couple times, then finally took it about 3 miles out in the country where the corn was, because someone mentioned that the little buggers have amazing homing instincts.)
But yeah, one vote for the Tin Cat method here... ^__^
(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-23 06:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-25 11:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-09-25 09:08 pm (UTC)