Poor Richard’s Almanac

Rats!!! (and mice) November 7, 2009

Readers, please cover your eyes if you can’t imagine a mouse in your house or greenhouse, or a (shudder) rat in your garage, attic, or chicken coop. Relief is only a (mouse) click away! (Sorry, I can never resist a pun.)

Our friend Ben’s family home was out in the country, and while there were no working farms around us, there was plenty of open space, including our 3 1/4-acre property. Every fall, the onset of cold weather signalled the field mice that it was time to leave their rapidly cooling nests and head into our Colonial home for the winter. Mercifully, there were never all that many, but we typically had at least one (or three) every winter.

Most of the time, my parents kept a snap-trap (the classic mousetrap) baited and set under the kitchen sink. As far as I know, my mother refused ever to look under the sink for any reason, but my father occasionally remembered to check the trap, especially if the horrendous stench of putrefying mouse provided a subtle reminder.

The experience of discovering and disposing of dead, decaying mice apparently was a bit much even for Father, though, and eventually he had the bright idea to put out mouse poison under the sink instead. Bad, bad idea!!! A poisoned mouse doesn’t just drop on the spot, clutching its stomach and giving deathbed orations like a Shakespearian actor. Instead, it will crawl quietly back into its hole in the wall to die. Into its, furthermore, completely inacessible hole in the wall, where it will stink to high heaven for a very, very long time, in a manner completely unrelated to its size. Our friend Ben has never forgotten that very distinctive smell, and sometimes I think I will carry the memory of it in my nostrils ’til I die. Certainly, it’s not a smell I ever want to encounter again in this life.

Unfortunately from the rodent-population point of view, Hawk’s Haven, the cottage home our friend Ben and Silence Dogood share in the precise middle of nowhere, PA, is surrounded by working farm fields. This is very rich territory for mice and voles of all types and stripes, and the farmers’ corncribs and barns are open invitations to rats as well. To make matters worse, our quaint country cottage is an old, rather rickety and ramshackle clapboard affair, with plenty of entry points for a determined mouse. (We’ve never had a rat in the house—knock on wood!—but a friend has told us such horror stories of rats invading his even more rural home that it’s enough to give us nightmares.) Just as in my childhood home, every fall when the frost is on the pumpkin, the mice decide that it’s time to head indoors. And it doesn’t take much for them to get in—mice can enter a home through a dime-size opening, and even rats only need a space the size of a half-dollar.

In the past, we’ve resorted to snap traps, but not only does it make us feel terrible to see the poor dead mouse in the trap, I have to say that frankly, we’re afraid of the traps. Neither Silence nor our friend Ben is what you’d call coordinated, and we’re far more likely to get caught in the trap ourselves while trying to set it. We also tried those plug-in thingies that supposedly emit some kind of noise that we can’t hear but rodents can. Uh-huh. And when, years ago, neighboring farm rats discovered the food bonanza at our little chicken coop, we did set out a poisoned bait station (which worked like a charm) after sending our hens on a spa vacation, then very sadly disposed of the rat bodies. To this day, we keep a poisoned bait box in an inaccessible (to the chickens) part of our chicken yard, but thank God, rats are smart and have very long communal memories, and we’ve never seen another one. (We’ve also learned to only set out as much food as our chickens can eat in a day.)

Our ultimate solution has been cats. We’ve found cats to be a marvelous deterrent to rodents of all kinds both inside and outside the house. Of course, some cats are better mousers than others, and all have distinctive techniques. There was Seamus Beaumaine, our enormous Maine coon male, the no-fuss, no-muss mouser. He’d catch any mouse that ventured indoors, toss it in the air, and swallow it whole. Then there was our Jessie, who worked out a collaborative arrangement with Silence, who loves the cute little native white-footed deer mice. Jessie would catch mice but never kill them. Instead, she’d trot around with an unharmed mouse in her mouth, making a very distinctive “I have a mouse!” noise. When Silence heard this, she’d get out of bed, turn on the living room lights, unlock the front door, and put on the heavy fireplace gloves. Jessie would bring the mouse to the front door and drop it on the doormat, at which point Silence would grab it with the gloves and toss it out the door. We still miss our Jess.

Our current indoor lineup of Athena, Linus and Layla are pretty much untried, mouse-wise. We think that’s because outdoor cats Simon and Dixie are doing such a good job that no mice can make it into the house. But based on past experience, we don’t think that two cats are quite enough to patrol our 2/3-acre property. In fact, we decided that the ideal number is eight outdoor cats to keep mice, rats, voles, squirrels, chipmunks, and rabbits at bay. Thanks to drop-offs by insensitive idiots, we’ve had eight (and more) here in the past. And at eight, our property is absolutely vermin-free.

By now, you may be wondering if there’s a solution that will keep your own place mouse- and/or rat-free that’s a little easier than importing an army of cats. We don’t like snap traps, poison inside the house is a definite no way, we’d as soon be dead as use those torturing, appalling glue traps, and live traps simply pass the problem on to someone else or to native rodent populations, and are illegal in several states for that reason. What to do?

Well, our friend Ben read about what looked like a simple and effective solution this morning on MSN. Maybe someone really has finally invented a better mousetrap! It’s called the Rat Zapper, but it works on mice as well. And as the name implies, it electrocutes its victims. Heading over to the Rat Zapper website (http://www.ratzapper.com/), our friend Ben saw that they carried two models, the Rat Zapper Classic and the new Infrared Rat Zapper Ultra, both of which look a bit like miniature covered bridges. You bait the battery-powered boxes, the mouse or rat wanders in for a bite, and zap! Once a rodent is killed by the trap, a red light on the trap comes on to alert you to empty it, which you do by simply upending it over the (we’re hoping, outdoor) trash can, then placing the trap back and rebaiting it to await its next victim. There are several accessories for your traps, including an outdoor cover to protect the batteries should you wish to use a trap outdoors. And the zap effect is supposed to be very quick and humane, as opposed to snap-traps, poison, glue traps, and (presumably) cats.

We’re not in the market for a mouse or rat trap at the moment, so God willing, we’ll never have to put a Rat Zapper to the test ourselves. But if we ever experience an invasion the cats can’t keep under control, you can bet we’ll be checking it out.

What else can you do? Shove lots of steel wool into the openings around pipes and into any holes in the exterior of your home to block rodent access. Block the mouths of pipes such as clothes dryer exhaust pipes where they emerge outdoors with screening, secured with the clamps that are used for plumbing pipes. Keep all your food, pet food, and birdseed in rodent-proof  metal, glass, or sturdy plastic containers if it’s not already canned or refrigerated. Don’t leave uneaten pet food sitting out overnight, either outside or inside. Cover the opening into your chimney with hardware cloth. And, of course, get cats!

How do you keep mice (or worse) out of your home?