There are mice in my house. My first clue was the holes in the dog food bag. Pick the thing up and pieces of kibble fall out on the bottom. Somebody is chewing small holes in the bottom of the dog food bag. Nubia is the first suspect. My sneaky little husky is coming into the living room for a midnight snack. But the holes in the bottom of the bag are too small and dainty to be the work of a 50 pound hyperactive dog. My second clue? The droppings left on the table where I leave the dog food bag. Too small to be husky droppings. Not even the border collie leaves droppings this small. To put it bluntly, these tiny droppings look like mouse s#@t. Yeah. This s#@t is coming from a mouse. A mouse has been eating the dog food. The expensive stuff that comes from Petsmart. Probably stuff that is more healthy for my dogs than the stuff in my refrigerator is for humans.
So I sneak into the living room to catch the little sucker eating the High Tech Diet Lamb and Rice. I turn on the light and they all scatter, squeaking like crazy. Nubia and Rocky come flying into the room, their predatory drive on full throttle zeroing in on the the little squeakers as they head for cover. One…two….three….four…five of them, four looking like the tiny ones running on the wheel at the local Petsmart, and one looking more like a small rat. Not quite as big as the pet shop monsters, but bigger than his little brothers and sisters. They all head down the hall going for the hole inside the linen closet. Now Cody the Border Collie pops through the door barking and giving the lead mouse the eye like a wayward sheep. One way or another, this unruly pack of canines and rodents needs to be herded back into the living room. Cherokee and Snowball follow Cody out of the bedroom, wondering what all the ruckus is about. Now the mouse pack, being chased by two dogs into the path of three more dogs, is in a panic. Cody runs past the streaking mice to cut around the back of the two chasing huskies while Cherokee is at a dead stop in front of the mousie hole. Snowball runs back into the bedroom to grab Cody’s space on the bed while all five mice go under Cherokee and into the mouse hole and Nubia and Rocky go crashing into Cherokee and slamming him into the closet door. All three huskies land in the pile in time for the border collie to come back down the hallway looking to herd the wayward mice. Much barking and arguing goes on as the mouse pack makes a clean escape with the dog food.
The next day I find myself at the rat poison aisle at the local hardware store. My choices are poison, the traditional old Victor mousetraps and glue pads. The idea of having poison around my dogs is scary, as is the idea of having Rocky stick his nose into a Victor trap and ending up with cheese embedded in his nose. So I spring for the glue pads. That leads to another problem. What to do with the mouse on the glue pad. Somehow, the idea of throwing the poor little mouse, still living, in the garbage to die under a pile of kitchen waste and backyard dog droppings seems like a horrible end. Of course I could bring the big rubber mallet I bought at Harbor Freight for $5.99 in from the garage to play whack-a-mouse, but again, that seems fairly brutal for a guy who rescues dogs. Of course my rescued dogs would have no problem eating the mice, except for Snowball, who thinks that mouse tastes like poorly prepared chicken, and is holding out for the salmon treats. Mouse, squirrel, possum, the neighbor’s cat. It’s all meat for the huskies. Mouse on a glue pad is kind of like corn dog on a stick with a longer tail to them. Of course PETA is against using glue traps. According to their web site, mice are highly intelligent and very social creatures. Doing further research on the internet, I found out that pouring vegetable oil under the mouse will allow him to eventually pull himself off of the trap and to freedom. But of course you might want to get far enough away from your place to make sure that what happened to this poor guy doesn’t happen to you…
So I basically take the little guy out to White Rock Lake and release him using the vegetable oil method into the woods. So he is free. Free to be caught by an owl or eaten by a hungry coyote, or a feral cat or just about any animal larger than a mouse. Yep. These little guys are the bottom of the food chain. Go onto You Tube and search “eating mouse”. Cat eating mouse. Snake eating mouse. Dog eating mouse. Rat eating mouse. Gerbil killing mouse. Damn. This little guy probably won’t last a day. It really sucks to be a mouse.
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