American Life
Unsere Kolumnistin hat ein Mausproblem – und ihre ganz speziellen Methoden, um es zu lösen.
Ginger Kuenzel on catching mice
As a single woman, I have found that there are numerous advantages to living alone: I can play my music as loudly as I want; I can shout at the television when some politician makes a stupid remark — which seems to happen with increasing frequency these days; I don’t have to let anyone know where I’m going when I leave the house or when I plan to return.
Now, though, I am no longer living alone. I have a housemate. In fact, I have several housemates. They don’t pay any rent, but they are as quiet as mice. In fact, that’s just what they are.
When I first noticed signs of mice in my garage, I was not too concerned. I thought there wasn’t much damage to be done in there. But when they moved into my living space, that was going too far. The first sign of them was a chewed-up roll of toilet paper in my bathroom. If they were that close to my bedroom, I thought, how long would it take before they became comfortable about visiting me in my bed at night? This will never do!
I immediately went out to buy mousetraps. There is a wide variety of these, I discovered. There is the old-fashioned wooden kind, which I don’t much like. It’s not that I care what they do to the mice, but I do care what they might do to my finger if I set the trap wrongly. There are also the sticky traps: The mouse walks onto it and is stuck for life. Much as I hate these mice, I don’t want to be inhumane. So I decided to use the plastic snap traps, which offer an instant kill.
The next question was what to use for bait. I learned from my internet research that mice love peanut butter. I wasn’t sure whether they prefer crunchy or smooth, but I went with smooth. My cousin, who lives nearby, has caught 34 mice in the past two weeks using gourmet peanut butter. I have been far less successful, which he says is because of the cheaper peanut butter I’m using. Wow! Who knew that mice could be so picky?
That leads me to the next problem. When I check my traps, I often find that the peanut butter has been licked clean, but there is no mouse in the trap. So it seems that I not only have a smartphone and a smart TV, but also very smart mice.
One friend makes his own trap by putting water in a bucket and building a ramp up to the bucket’s rim. He then puts a rod through a soda bottle and smears peanut butter on the far end of the bottle. The rod stretches across the bucket. The mouse goes up the ramp and steps on the bottle, which starts spinning, depositing the mouse in the water below. Now, that’s what I call inventing a better mousetrap!