Mouse vs Man

There is a battle afoot, and, frankly it isn’t a pleasant one.

We have mice: in the kitchen, in the scullery, in the study.  Each morning we walk through the downstairs looking for evidence of Mickey activity.  It isn’t particularly pleasant, and somewhat galling to discover that the old wives’ tale of rats and mice not co-existing isn’t true.  We have rats in the pomegranate tree, we have mice under the sink.

We had a similar problem in the previous house so we already had a handy stash of regular mouse traps.  For the last five days Ian has been baiting three of them each day and placing them in strategic positions.  Each morning he has found, on checking the traps, that Mickey and his friends are exceedingly well fed mice.  This week alone they’ve feasted on peanut butter, chocolate, mozzarella cheese and chocolate coffee muffins.  Feasted, but failed to trigger a single trap.

Mouse 1, humans 0

Or if we’re being entirely accurate and working on the number of days and traps: Mouse 15, humans 0

Today we made a run into town and popped into Carrefour.  A quick review of the pests aisle showed that we had three options: standard (and non-effective it appears) traps, glue traps (that we’re not prepared to use.  They’re effective but far, far from humane) and finally some exotic and expensive traps designed by the Swiss.  In desperation we picked up a pack of the Swiss traps: almost 10€ for two traps.

Tonight, less than one hour after the first Swiss trap was laid, we had our first catch.  We think that there’s only a small number of mice involved, perhaps two or three.

It seems that the Swiss make effective mouse traps as well as watches.  Who knew?

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