What to do when wildlife visits human homes
I was finishing work at my vet clinic this week when a message came in on my phone from my wife: “Can you come home as quickly as possible: a badly injured mouse is in trouble”.
I called her at once: what was the detailed background to this message? Whose mouse was hurt, and what sort of injury had been inflicted?
It turned out that a mouse had been half-caught in a mousetrap in a neighbour’s house: the mouse was still alive but nobody was brave or knowledgable enough to know what todotohelpit.
I drove home as rapidly as I could, and rushed straight into the room where the incident was going on. The mousetrap was a plastic-type of trap, so its jaws were less severe than a standard metal mousetrap. If a mouse’s full body is caught in the trap, it will be crushed and instantaneously killed. However this mouse had half-managed to escape in the microsecond as the trap snapped shut. One foot had been caught in the jaws of the trap, so the poor creature was alive and active. The mouse was running around, dragging the trap behind it. The only problem was that it could not disappear into its usual mouse hole, as the mousetrap was too big to fit.
It’s always difficult to know the best thing to do in these situations: everything happened so quickly. The first thing I did was to put on some gardening gloves: wild animals (even tiny mice) can inflict painful bites on bare hands. The second thing I did was simple: I opened the trap to release the mouse. In my mind, the idea was that once I had relieved the cause of the mouse’s problem, I could then assess its injuries. If they were severe, I might have had to euthanase the mouse.
As it turned out, the mouse didn’t give me a chance to carry out a detailed examination: as soon as it had been freed from the trap, it scuttled across the floor and dived down its mouse hole. I felt relieved: its injuries were obviously relatively minor, and there was no need for any radical action. I never like taking an animal’s life, even when necessary as the only way of relieving suffering.
I thought that I had handled the issue competently, but when I reported the saga to my neighbour, she was horrified. “You did WHAT?” Now it became apparent that there were two sides to this story.
She has a serious fear of mice, and she has been plagued by a few visiting housemice over the past months. She can hear them scuttling around behind the floorboards at night, and she finds this deeply unsettling. So she had started an anti-mouse campaign, placing mousetraps around her home in strategic places. Her aim is to kill the mice humanely, which is fair enough. I have no problem with mousetraps when they snap shut across a mouse’s neck or body, causing instant, painless death.
In any case, she was not impressed that a mouse had been almost caught, and I had then released it back behind her skirting boards. I had accidentally managed to perpetuate her mouse problem. And she had a point: it would have been better if I had released the mouse some distance from her home, so that it would leave her in peace.
What could I do now? I resorted to the basics of rodent control: the first task is to remove the appeal of a home to mice. Make sure that there are no food sources, such as biscuit crumbs at the back of sofas. I used decorator’s caulk to seal the mousehole, as well as other possible entry points to and from skirting boards and any gaps that led to the outside world. And I told her to keep using the mousetraps: I prefer these to poison, as they cause less suffering.
She already has a cat, by the way, but his skills as a mouse hunter are weak.
It’s common for there to be conflict between humans and wildlife: I heard of a different difficult situation this week which caused extreme distress to a family. They had buried a much loved pet in their garden a few months ago. They woke up one morning this week to discover that a fox had broken into the grave. They were desperately upset., and wanted to know what they could do to keep foxes away. They have other pets, and they worry that the fox might hurt them.
First, to reassure people: foxes very rarely harm pets. Most dogs and cats are too big and strong to be seen as prey, Elderly or very young animals, or sick pets, may be vulnerable, so should not be allowed outside unsupervised.
It is difficult to keep foxes away completely, but the basic principle is the same as keeping mice away: remove all possible food sources, and close all possible entry points. This means do not feed foxes, even if you feel sorry for them. If you feed birds, make sure that it isn’t possible for foxes to access the food at all. And go around the perimeter of your garden, filling in gaps that might allow a fox to sneak through. I hope that his advice will stop foxes from visiting this family’s garden in the future.
There was a sad post script to the mouse saga this morning. Or perhaps not sad, depending on your viewpoint. There was another “snap” from my neighbour’s mousetraps, and when she investigated, she found a dead mouse, killed instantly by a perfect blow across its neck. I’m not sure that this was the same mouse that I’d rescued, but for my neighbour, it’s one less mouse in her home to worry about.