One of the Reasons I Like my Husband
Last night as I was getting ready to write my post about canning tomatoes (look for it later in the week)… my husband called me into our family room. He asked me to sit down on the sofa and look at the fireplace. Huh? I asked him, what about our fireplace? We have a gas fireplace and he had turned it on. The room smelled strange… the smell of a heater after a summer of disuse. It wasn’t cold last evening, so I couldn’t figure out what he was up to. Then from out of the very skinny grates, squeezed a little mouse. It ran along the hearth and then under our TV armoire. Oh boy.. a mouse in the house.
“I’ve been watching him for a while and he’s kinda cute.” my husband says, “I’d really hate to kill him.” “Let’s try to get him to him go outside.”
So armed with brooms and the back door open, we tried to shoo the little mouse out the door. And all the while, I’m thinking of that movie, “Mouse Trap.” Either we have a smart mouse or he found somewhere really good to hide, because we could not get him to leave the armoire.
After our best effort, I finally said, “We can’t have a mouse in the kitchen. We’ve got to set out the traps.” So we got a little chocolate… which neither mice (nor I) can resist and set the traps.
I entered the family room early this morning with trepidation, not looking forward to finding a dead mouse. And that smart little mouse never took the bate. Maybe he doesn’t like Hershey’s Chocolate Bars… maybe he’s a chocolate snob, like me, and loves Belgian Chocolate. I don’t know.
But that little mouse can’t stay in the house. We need to find a better mouse trap. Maybe my husband will go today and find a trap that captures the mouse instead of kills him… that’ll make him happy.
And when I think about it, I can’t help loving that I married a man who would save a mouse if he could.
Mouse Update: The mouse does like Hershey’s Chocolate. I knew I should never have mentioned the movie “Mouse Trap.” That little bugger got away with the chocolate without ever springing the traps!
There is a humane trap called MICE CUBE by Pied Piper International in New Castle NH. I got mine at the grocery store. I put a little peanut butter on a cheezit and a little on the door of the trap, always catch the little guys in an hour or two and put them safely back in the woods.
Thanks Paula, we are off to check our local store and see if we can find the Mice Cube. It looks like a great solution. My son already asked if he could keep it as a pet. Sorry no, he will be much happier out in the woods!
Hope you find one. I love mine because my cat brings live mice home……he’s desperate for friends. So I always get a few in the fall and the spring. Poor kitty.
you can get transparent humane traps.. we have used them when discovering a mouse one year who had a taste for easter chocolate. the only thing i would say is to let the mouse go as far away from your house as possible… as we had a repeat exercise for 3 days… we either had 3 mice or had created a very amusing tlittle game for our one mouse! good luck x
We’ve picked up our humane traps at Wal-Mart or Ace Hardware..they’re pretty common to find. I say “we” but really mean HE…..:)
It isn’t humane, but we had great success with a glob of peanut butter and putting the trap perpendicular to the wall because they scurry along wall edges. Good luck!
So funny, but isn’t the little critter cute?? Now I have to share a true story and I am the wicked one in it, sigh! My oldest son brought home a white mouse from school for the summer (I had told him NO), I I warned him, you better take care of it, and not let it get lose, no mice in my house. WELL, I went downstairs to do the laundry, going into his room to pick up here came that little critter across the floor, with a thought, I lifted my foot and brought it down on it, I honestly thought I would step on his tail, but missed and got him, sigh, of course I killed it, so I put it outside in the garbage, and never said a word about it. Steve came to me saying he lost the mouse, I told him, your problem, you better find it, I told you no mice in the house, to this day only I know what happened to that mouse, grin. Barb in WNC
Oh my. I hope the humane trap does work, but if it doesn’t (they DID not work for us last year), glue traps definitely do the job. (And yes, they are gruesome and horrible, but the mice were multiplying and THAT was gruesome and horrible!)
We used peanut butter on the traps when I was a kid. My little sister was terrified of mice. I thought they were quite charming and would have been glad to share house and home with them (not any more, of course!)…but when one came into our shared basement bedroom one evening, it fell to me to hit it with a shoe while my sister scrambled onto the bunk bed screaming bloody murder. And bloody murder it was…I think I’ll always be a bit scared by that killing. *sigh* I really didn’t think I’d be fast enough to get it.
Best of luck with your little intruder!
Be diligent! We found mice in our house shortly after moving in and have been battling them for almost a year! Apparently they mate year round, have 10-15 babies at a time and are ready to mate again in 2-5 days!
funny thing…..our cat likes to bring them in to show us his ‘prize’, but when he’s finished, the dog rounds them up and ‘plays’ with them, putting them out of their misery!!!!
Not humane at all, but at least I don’t have them breeding in my house!!
;o)
Hi Wendy, we have a Wheaten Terrier and they are supposed to get rid of rodents… but so far he’s not too interested. So far the little mouse has avoided or traps. I’m not too happy about it! All the best, Calli
in our last house, our cat Sampson caught some mice in the laundry. But he never killed them – just played catch and release! So, we would then catch Sampson (not always easy when he had a prize!) and get him to drop the mouse over a big laundry basket so that we could then take the mouse outside. Of course, this always happened at 3am and never during daylight hours!
Good luck with your chocolate loving mouse!
Try Sherman traps. Then you can take the critter and return him to the field, far enough from your place that he won’t remember how to get back (seriously). Good luck! :)
Oh my! I think I laughed sooo hard I cried! That was funny! Although those little tiny sweet creatures make me feel violated!! :)
[…] And then to issue the final blow to Ben’s quilt, which I love, it was chewed on by our very smart mouse friend that visited our home. I could have killed the mouse for that… (luckily for the mouse, it was caught alive and […]