GHENT, N.Y. — There’s an attractive rug in our guest bedroom. I don’t know what kind of rug it is, but it’s been in our family a long time.
I found a photo of it sitting in my grandparents’ apartment in Romania during the 1930s. They immigrated to the United States in 1939, bringing the rug with them.
Only one thing mars its appearance — an unmissable 2-inch square hole. Except it’s not square, because mice don’t respect right angles. The rug had been rolled up under a bed for years. I discovered the hole when it was recently returned to service.
I don’t want to make too big deal of it, but my grandparents successfully managed to get out of Europe with their rug before World War II, but I dropped the ball and failed to prevent our mice from turning it into nesting material.
For years, we employed a nationally advertised extermination service — the kind that spends millions on TV commercials showing caterwauling cartoon pests biting the dust — but all the company seemed to do was annoy our vermin. My wife says she knew something was wrong when our exterminator paused during his monthly inspection, examined our living room and said, “I like what you’ve done here.”
Obviously, he missed his calling as an interior decorator, because pest control wasn’t his forte.
Mice are furtive little creatures, so, we didn’t run into them often. But, I heard them scurrying in the walls and ceilings at night. And then there was the unmistakable yet unlocatable odor on the rare occasion when one of them consumed the bags of aquamarine poison pellets the technician scattered about and bit the dust; they were not to be mistaken for the mice’s more prevalent monochromatic pellets.
Either that or the poor creatures would fail to extricate themselves from the glue traps the exterminator left for us to stumble upon. Typically, the only thing they caught were insects, against which I harbor less animus.
I fired the company and decided to take matters into my own hands, adopting a policy I’ve never heard better or more succinctly articulated than by Scott Evil, the snarky son of Austin Powers’ nemesis.
After Dr. Evil promises to place Powers “in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death,” Scott snaps, “I have a gun in my room. You give me five seconds, I’ll get it, I’ll come back down here. Boom! I’ll blow their brains out.”
Rather than paying somebody 50 bucks a month for the privilege of humoring the pests and complimenting our decor, I decided to get serious. I didn’t buy those traditional wooden spring-loaded traps, mostly because I’m not good with technology, no matter how rudimentary, and would have failed to set it properly or catch anything besides my index finger.
Instead, I went to our local hardware store and purchased several streamlined plastic “Press ‘N Set” traps. No assembly was required, they had a reservoir for the bait and ferocious teeth that terrified me, if not the rodents.
I don’t take pride in killing things. As far as I’m concerned, the only justification for capital punishment is self-defense. But, these buggers were systematically consuming precious family heirlooms.
I started getting results immediately. It’s not just cartoon mice that go crazy for cheese, even though I’ve lately switched to store-brand peanut butter. It’s cheaper and more spreadable. Smooth or chunky makes no difference.
The rodents seem to enjoy both equally. Those I feel sorriest for are the unfortunates that trigger the traps and perish before they get to enjoy the creamy peanut butter goodness, though I appreciate not having to resupply the traps.
But, make no mistake about it. This isn’t like shooting fish in a barrel. Mice are quick studies. I frequently find the devices still set but the bait completely devoured. Part of the problem is that, while the mechanism is advertised as “Guaranteed,” there’s only so many times a cheap plastic trap can survive the G-forces unleashed when a mouse triggers the spring. The contraption typically breaks after only a few outings.
I also suspect that something wilier and higher up the food chain, such as a chipmunk, may have learned how to plunder the traps without tripping them. Chipmunks prefer the outdoors, but occasionally seek refuge in our porous basement when our dog is doing her rounds.
And last year we played host to a country rat attracted to the sunflower seeds that fell from our bird feeders, though he preferred the garage. I bought the larger rat version of a mouse trap. It was a big, black evil-looking device, but the only thing it succeeded in trapping was my thumb. Boy, did that hurt! I eventually dispatched the interloper, after several failed attempts, by buying him a toxic meal, tossing it down the labyrinth he’d built under the garage and plugging up his escape routes.
My mice strategy is to lay about a half-dozen traps throughout the basement, hoping that if one is broken and doesn’t get them, the next one will. I don’t keep score, but I estimate I “harvest” somewhere between 25 and 50 critters a season.
I used to turn their disposal into an Olympic event, chucking them in the woods by releasing the trap and tossing their remains in one smooth athletic motion, earning extra points for maximum distance. But, our dog started finding them and bringing them home, which sort of defeated the purpose. So, now, they go straight into the outdoor trash bin.
There are no more scurrying sounds in the walls at night. No more unpleasant odors. No more holes in the rugs. And the traps are more humane than poison or glue that killed them slowly, if at all.
As proud as I am to have solved our problem — I can’t remember the last time one made it beyond the basement — I welcome spring’s arrival, when the lilacs bloom and the mice return to their outdoor residences.