What to do with a mouse in the house
Country Notebook
IT’S a phrase wrongly attributed to the American essayist and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. But there is more than a grain of truth in the saying that, if you build a better mouse trap, the world will beat a path your door. The house mouse is an enduring problem, especially in winter when the weather turns cold and a hungry mouse – or several – fancies a change of scene.
We don’t keep a cat, but our spaniel has a sensitive nose and, when she spent a good ten minutes snuffling and sniffing around the doors to the cupboard under the sink, we were more than a little curious.
When we unrolled the bin bags we keep under there – and found one had been perforated so that hundreds of tiny pieces of plastic fluttered on to the kitchen floor like confetti – we knew there was likely to have been an invader.
There are several ways to deal with mice but the old spring-loaded mouse trap that you bait with a bit of bacon or a sliver of cheese is still, to my mind, the most effective, even if it does have a habit of going off and catching your fingers when you set it!
We have two kinds of cheddar cheese in our house at Christmas, the ordinary Davidstow – still a fine cheese – for cooking and general use and the Mary Quicke’s mature clothwrapped cheddar, for the cheeseboard. Mice are not that picky, so the Davidstow was selected.
On the first night, I set the trap with high expectations. In the morning the cheese was gone; but the trap remain unsprung. A second attempt proved more successful, however. Householders 1, Housemouse 0. Prevention, however, is much better than cure, and the next job is to discover how the little blighters are getting in and block off their entrance. It is not as if there isn’t enough food out in the garden, with windfall apples, excess bird food and other flotsam and jetsam to keep even the hungriest mouse fed through the lean months. And if they fancy making a home in the old shed, that’s fine by me.
I did read a piece that said we should be more tolerant of sharing our homes with ‘wild life’ but I am not sure having a mammal that can carry hantavirus, salmonellosis and listeria in the kitchen is a good idea, so I’m going to pack the gap around an outlet pipe from the dishwater, a likely mouse access point, with wire wool, which is said to be pretty good at keeping them out. As to that better mouse trap, if you Google how to deal with a house mouse, 67 million results come up, including dozens of traps, both deadly and those that catch the mouse alive. Take your pick. Sometimes, however, tried and tested is best.