Rat traps and caring people

                                                                      By Dave Hamby

              My buddy Darin had an unusual problem with his new car last month. He had just come back into town after an eight day trip and was behind the wheel for the first time when his “check engine” and warning lights in the dash began to flicker on and off.  

              He’s one of those folks who know all about computers, and he knew that most of what goes on with a new car has to do with it’s computer, so he diagnosed correctly that something was amiss with his little Volvo’s artificial intelligence and resolved to have it looked at later that day.  On his way home his car began to have more problems.  The engine began to sputter, more lights flashed, steam began to wisp out from under his hood.  Things were not well.  

               He barely made it home.  When he got there he opened the hood to see what was going on.  There, on top of his motor, he found a rat’s nest.  

              Now if you look at most new car’s engines you’ll find what looks like a rat’s nest of wires and hoses, but what he found was in fact a real rat’s nest.  It seems like El Rato decided to move uptown and had succeeded in finding the most expensive place in Darin’s home for his new abode.  

             Darin told me that while he was looking at the chewed up wires and vacuum lines, he spotted the little culprit looking at him from around the corner.  He looked around for something to throw at the rat to wipe that little sneer off his face, but by the time he could get his hands on anything the rat was gone.

             When Darin told me about this I told him what he needed to do was kill that rat.   Don’t mess around with any “Have-a-Heart” traps or any such humane nonsense, get a glue trap and when the rat gets stuck on it, put the trap in a bag and stomp on it.  

              I didn’t make this suggestion because I’m a mean person. It’s just that I’ve had my share of experience with mice and rats.

              My problems started when my in-bred Irish Setter, who was also a really good mouser, got bone cancer and had to be put down.  It wasn’t a week after her death that we started getting calling cards telling us that we had a new occupant in our home.  Little droppings started appearing on our kitchen counter.  Holes manifested themselves on our bread bag and tunnels appeared in the loaf.  My cereal had an equal mix of shredded wax paper wrapper and brown specks.  We had a new tenant.

              Fancying myself as a sensitive, humane individual, I went and purchased some Have-a-Heart mouse traps.  These are little plastic boxes, closed on one end with a hinged door on the open end, and a little plastic ridge in the middle to serve as a fulcrum. With some bait placed at the closed end the unwanted guest will enter the box and his weight will tip the fulcrum and cause the door to slam shut.  Voila!  You then take the trapped critter, which is as deserving of life as any of God’s other creatures, out to a field and set him free, free to follow you back home and resume his snacking on your cereal.

              The first night I set the traps right before bedtime. I didn’t even have the covers on me when I heard the distinct “click” of one of the traps going off.  Thinking I must have erred in setting the trap, surely no mouse could be that brazen, I went to investigate.  

              There on my counter top was a trap with the door closed.  I couldn’t tell by the weight if I had in fact trapped my first mouse, or if the door hadn’t been set properly in the upright position.  

             I picked the trap up and held it close to my eye and opened the door just the tiniest little bit to see if there was a mouse inside.  That’s when I discovered that mice don’t need much of an opening to get out.  The dang little critter jumped out of the box onto my face, ran up my head, across my scalp and down my back inside my shirt. I did what any red blooded macho man would have done in a similar circumstance, I screamed like a girl and started jumping around the kitchen flailing my arms and slapping at my back.  This only seemed to upset the little critter more and he quit his journey down my back, changed directions, and ran up my belly and across my chest. He finally popped out of my shirt sleeve, jumped onto the counter, and disappeared behind some canisters.

              When I’d finished jumping around the kitchen and making weird noises, I discovered my wife and my middle daughter standing in the hallway staring at me with very concerned looks on their faces.  

            “It was a mouse.” I explained.  

           “That’s OK Daddy,” said my daughter, who was only three at the time, “Big ol’ elephants are afraid of mice too.”  

             I reset the traps and went to bed.   I didn’t sleep that night; I had way too much adrenalin in my system.  

             About three in the morning I heard another of the traps click shut.   Either I’d caught another mouse or the first one had come back for a second helping of dinner. That next morning I carefully took the closed trap, set it on the dashboard of my pickup and proceeded with my normal routine of taking my daughter to her day care and then going to work.  At the day care I was reaching behind the seat for my girl’s backpack when I heard her say, “Daddy, what’s this?” Before I could shout “Noooo!” she’d opened the lid and the little mousy was squeezing his little body into the vent opening on top of my dash.

              That night I left my truck in my body shop with both doors open and boards to serve as ramps from my truck’s interior to the floor. I scattered a wealth of cookies and crackers around hoping to entice the little bugger out of my truck.

              After I did this for a week I decided that my truck was most likely unoccupied and all I needed to do was clean the floor and recharge my battery. It was dead because of the dome light being on so much.

              I had my truck back, that was until the first really hot day when I left my truck parked outside with the windows rolled up.  After work when I opened my door the stench almost knocked me over.  I knew now he was dead, I just had to figure out where his little corpse was.

             I removed the entire interior of my truck that night, stopping only to gag and throw up every now and again.   After dismantling everything I still hadn’t found the little corpus mousy, but I was able to determine that the stink was coming from my front seat.  I ripped the upholstery off the seat and I found the little stinker in one of the holes in the high density foam, right above a seat spring.  It appears that he had settled in there for a little nap and when I sat down, I squashed him.

              That was enough for me.  To heck with kindness and humanity, I needed to kill those little mice.  

             Mouse poison did a really good job of killing the little critters, but they would come out of the woodwork to do their death swoon and that really grossed out my wife and daughter.  

             Regular mouse traps also did a good job, but I lost a few fingernails baiting them.   One went off on our kitchen counter so hard the mouse’s eyeballs popped out and were stuck on the toaster.  Talk about grossing out the girls.

              Finally I resorted to glue traps.  They also have the benefit of giving you that satisfying sense of completion when you hear that little crunch coming out of the bag when you stomp on them...

              After we moved out into the country in our present home, I got me a cat.   Meester Gatos does a fine job of making certain every rodent knows they’re not welcome here.

               We all lived happily ever after, that is until my youngest daughter brought home some gerbils. But that’s another story.