Constable: Is there an ethical way to get a mouse out of your house?
Titled, "The arsenal," Karey Ross's Facebook post of various mouse traps took an unexpectedly dark turn.
"Imagine your death," a man responded. "Would you want your neck broken in one fell sweep or would you like to be glued to the floor and left to starve to death?"
Others chimed in with similar grisly observations. "You'll have to hear them screaming as they try to get loose," warned a woman. A private message explained the tedious process of using oil to free a chipmunk caught in a glue trap. Who knew rodents were so beloved?
"I was shocked," says Ross, 57, who lives in a townhouse in Warrenville. "I consider myself an animal lover. I'm the kind of person that will take a box elder bug outside, but I don't want to live with a mouse."
According to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), mice are "complex, unique beings with the capacity to experience a wide range of emotions." I'm not sure what was in the head of the mouse we discovered on our floor this week, because its head was missing. Our cat, Maggie, probably knows something about that, which reminds me of the 1970s cartoon by B. Kliban featuring a guitar-playing, blues cat singing, "Love to eat them mousies. Mousies what I love to eat. Bite they little heads off. Nibble on they tiny feet."
My distaste, even fear, of mice goes back to my childhood, when a former grain-storage room in our 19th Century farmhouse was converted into a bedroom for my brother, Bill, and me. Sharing a bed, Bill and I could hear the mice scampering in the attic above us. When tiny feet hit the ceiling panel housing the fluorescent light, we watched the mice glide across the opaque cover as if they were skaters in Disney's "Mice on Ice." Too many mice and they might just break through the plastic and fall into our bed.
I saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of mice around the farm. Men used to put rubber bands around their pant legs on the day we emptied the corn crib so the fleeing rodents wouldn't scamper up their legs. I'm still haunted by the scene when Dad used chains and a tractor with a scoop to lift a giant wooden barn door that had been tossed to the ground by a tornado and left on the grass for a year. A handful of barn cats gathered as Dad raised the door to reveal a Mouse City, with dozens of mice living in secrets dens connected by a maze of tunnels. Suddenly exposed, the mice ran in all directions as the cats leapt into the killing field. Some cats, three or four squirming mice clenched in their jaws, trotted off to enjoy their feast. Other cats would pounce, leave a mess of mangled mice and bound off to lay waste to another mouse family amid the fleeing hordes. Even then, it was hard for me to feel sympathy for mice.
"It's important to remember these animals are just trying to survive and feed their families," explains Kristin Rickman, the emergency response division manager for PETA's cruelty investigations department, who says she thinks that people "are becoming more compassionate toward rodents." The only way to end the cruelty is to seal holes and cracks in your home, sweep up crumbs and keep food in rodent-proof containers. Rags soaked in ammonia and strobe lights in crawl spaces can also discourage mice from moving into your home.
"Either you put in the effort to rodent-proof your house or you have a never-ending cycle," Rickman says.
While PETA does have a webpage explaining how you can catch mice and relocate them, those traps must be checked hourly so they do not become "prisons." If you put the mice outside and haven't sealed off the entries, they'll come back in. Move them farther than 100 yards away, and they won't know how to survive in the strange surroundings.
"We don't recommend live-trapping in the winter," Rickman says. But if you must, Rickman suggests a "soft release" where you use wood or a sturdy container to "make a little mouse house with a door," line it with straw, newspaper, cotton or fleece, supply a week's worth of high-calorie food such as peanut butter, bird suet or dry cat food, order cable and conceal it with branches or leaves in a heavily wooded area.
If you do build an insulated mouse house, stock it with food and move it to the nearest forest preserve, just remember. If you put that photo on Facebook, you might be surprised by the comments.