Them what has claws.
Domino tries to earn his keep.
My! What big paws you have!
Today's catch was in my linen closet. In my bedroom.The first two pictures* are from Tuesday, in the kitchen. Domino has it, although I'm not necessarily convinced that he caught it originally. Kaboom the Coward was actually seen to capture a mouse and bring it back to his lair on Monday night. His lair? Beneath my bed. In the middle of the night, we were up late nursing the twins when Kaboom came running in with something in his mouth, ran under the bed and then chased it around for awhile.
Great! He's brought a mouse into my bedroom? Time until the mouse escapes? Less than 5 minutes. We figured they'd work that out on their own or we'd find a dead mouse in the morning. No such luck. Instead, I caught Domino in the kitchen with one. Was the the same mouse? I could only hope.
Wait, let me back up a little.
We found mice in the garage. Not a big surprise, but still technically outside the house. Then we found them in the boiler room in the basement, eating bags of spaghetti and that's what led us to leave the door open for the cats to get them. Unfortunately, that resulted in this trauma, which led us to shut the door and consider poison. Mom then mentioned seeing mouse poop in the cupboard that held the catfood which then led to clearing out the cupboard and under the sink (yet more mouse poop) to the tune of continual swearing from Eric. He takes the mouse invasion personally. Mom thinks it means we're going to have a hard winter. I don't know about that, but it does mean that we're about to have a killing spree on mice. Eric cleared out both cupboards and we left the doors open to allow the cats access to any mice bold enough to pop out at night. The very first night we did that is when Kaboom brought the first one up.
Now we have two ex-mice.
Eric has purchased poison and laid it down in the garage and in the boiler room. Traps seemed crueler, somehow. Live traps are beyond our capacity to deal with right now (Remember? Twins? Yeah.). Now we'll see who has the upper hand in The Great Mouse Invasion: 2007.
* Oh come on! Of course I had to photograph it!
2 comments:
And now for my opinion, brought to you by me, Red Flashlight, with heavy reference to my psycho neighbor Adrian, her black cat whose name is now lost to the four winds, and a plethora of clever but now unfortunately dead mice:
1) Live traps don't work.
2) Hiding all of your food away in glass jars and other unchewable containers does not work.
3) Without poison or death traps, mice numbers increase exponentially over time. No matter what. "Catching them and putting them out" only results in an ever-more-sophisticated and well practiced mice catcher, who then feels useless pride for her oh-so-advanced catch-and-release methods.
4) Poisoning mice often results in poisoned cats.
5) Death traps are nasty, traumatic, and difficult to use, but they work.
I'm not too worried about the cats getting poisoned since they are seriously not interested in actually eating the mice. If they turned up with parts of mice, I'd be concerned.
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