I drowned two small rodents this week. I held their little heads under water until they quit struggling. I don't remember ever drowning an animal before. (This may be a case of suppressed memories.) A darker side of my personality may be emerging.
Critter #1 was a gray mouse with bright little black button eyes. It was clumsy. Rather than being caught in my trap properly by jostling the trip level while enjoying a last meal of peanut butter, it apparently tripped over the trigger in passing and was caught by its back leg. This, of course, was not fatal. I heard the trap snap shut in the wee hours of the morning in the attic-closet beside our bedroom. I heard the trap being dragged across the floor. I heard rustlings. I heard the trap being dragged around some more. I thought of the mementoes and Christmas decorations stored in that attic space and the destruction done to such items when a mouse discovers them. I wondered how much of the mouse was caught and thought about the possibility of it chewing off the trapped body part and continuing to live in the attic. By the end of an hour, I had moved on to meditating my approach to mouse murder.
Trying to make as little noise as possible in order to avoid disturbing my husband (whose chosen form of mouse elimination is poison), I gathered a flashlight, an old sherbert container, and a magazine. The capture of mouse and trap didn't go as smoothly nor as quietly as I hoped (a couple of involuntary "eeks" escaped my mouth when the mouse got too close for comfort), but eventually I emerged with mouse and trap in the sherbert container and the magazine acting as a lid.
Ordinarily, at this point, I would consider release outside. However, there were a couple of aggravating factors. (1) I wasn't ready to give up my trap and couldn't figure out how to release the mouse without getting bitten. (2) I had been home alone most of the week and this mouse had been impersonating an intruder in the night with its rustlings, depositing droppings on the utensils in my kitchen drawers, and then moving into the attic with our family keepsakes, leaving me with less than kindly feelings toward it. I'll spare you the details of what happened in the bathroom, but it was over fairly quickly and the mouse was dead when I disposed of it on the woods side of the house.
Just a few days later, I found buckwheat seeds in my clean laundry. Grrrrr!!! There were two crimes committed here -- messing up my laundry and wreaking destruction in the drawer in the basement where I store my garden seeds. My thoughts turned to that little gray mouse and I was glad I had drowned it and wished I could do it again. However, when I checked my seed drawer, I heard rustlings in the wall behind the cabinet. Grrr. More traps.
This time I caught voles -- little brown mouse-like rodents. The first two were clean killings. Vole #3 ran off with my trap. I searched high and low through the garden clutter before finding it. Another incomplete kill. It should have been dead. The trap had closed over its neck and skull, doing plenty of damage. Yet, it was still alive at 10 in the morning! I admired its will to live but felt obliged to finish it off after doing so much damage. There was a bucket of collected rainwater outside the basement door. I dropped mouse and trap in the bucket and held it down. I waited for the struggling to stop. And waited. The little critter must have had an extraordinary will to live. It lasted much longer underwater than the mouse did a few days earlier.
Two rodents deprived of life in just a few days. Premeditation in each case. I'm hoping the word gets around the neighborhood rodent population.
I put what seeds weren't ruined in plastic boxes and threw out the rest, but I probably need to do a house inspection for entry points. I prefer to live at peace with my furry woodland neighbors as much as possible.
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