Instrument of Near-Death

Warning: the following post can be rather upsetting for animal lovers. If you're at all squeamish about bad things happening to tiny creatures, you may just want to skip this one.

I tried to do the Right Thing, really I did.

As part of the experience of house-sitting for my parents these past few weeks, I've discovered that they have a mouse problem. It seems that when the weather outside gets cold, they look for warm old houses in which to hide out and you know, do mouse-things like eat, breed and defecate.

As an urbanite, I stand decidedly on the side of ignoring the problem until it goes away... since you don't generally have problems like these when you live in a glass box in the sky. Besides, the idea of killing a mouse just seems horrible! They're not bugs, they're cute, and have fur, and tiny little legs!

But then I talked to my parents who insisted that the only right thing to do was to lay out the mouse trap. The little bugger could chew through electrical cables and start a fire, or start breeding tiny little defecating mice all over the house. Catch and release wasn't an option they insisted, they apparently always find a way back, even from as far as 5k away.

I decided to be an adult, do the Right Thing, and set out a trap, a trap I knew to be less-than-instantaneous, but sadly the only trap we have here. Maybe the one time I'd seen it take a couple minutes to kill a mouse was a fluke. Maybe the trap was, as my father insisted, a quick and efficient end.

It isn't.

I never even heard the trap go off. I only know what happened because I checked in before I went to bed. I opened the cupboard to find this tiny mouse just lying there next to the trap, little bits of mouse blood scattered about. It would seem that she managed to struggle free, but now lacked the motor skills to do much more than that.

She wasn't dead though. Looking closely, I could see her little lungs pushing her belly up and down quickly. She was dying and terrified.

I didn't really have any options. I grabbed some paper towels, bent down to pick her up and her little legs waved around sporadically for a moment, and then she lay still. I put on my father's shoes, carried her out into the front yard and crushed what was left of her, little bits of blood coming through the white paper towels. When I was sure she was dead, I tossed her into the garbage, came inside and washed my hands... a lot.

I'm not writing about this to upset the animal-friendly folk on here. I don't think this is cool or even interesting. The whole this is rather upsetting for me, so I wanted to write about it. Maybe I shouldn't be upset, maybe I just need better, more lethal traps, I don't know. I just hate how I feel right now and needed to share.