At home with the mice

For the last week we have been trying to deter some unwelcome guests of the rodent variety.

Fair play to Cardiff Council, their pest control service came out the day after we called them and were very helpful in a) helping us realise this wasn't an insurmountable problem, b) reassuring us that this was a very common problem for lots of people at the moment, and c) advising us on what to do.

So we now have a house full of tasty poison, which we think is working, The mouse poos, that they handily leave behind as evidence of where they've been, are getting smaller. Which presumably means the mice are getting smaller, which means we've killed off the big ones and now the small ones are venturing out.

As an animal lover I do feel a bit conflicted poisoning mice, but less so after we discovered one had pooed on our toaster (and possibly in our toaster). We have now binned said appliance and are waiting for the mice to be eradicated before replacing it.

We have also been using a lot of anti-bac cleaning wipes and having a big tidy / clean under and behind the furniture. It's quite hard work, but necessary. If only, because otherwise you sit there wondering what is behind / under the sofa you're sitting on.

And that's not a nice feeling at all.

The war escalates

After setting traps to cath the mice in my friend's loft the other day, we returned last night to find that all the bait had been eaten out of one unsprung trap. And the other trap had COMPLETELY DISAPPEARED!

We have our theories on that. It could be a) bigger rodents than mice, who wouldn't be particularly affected by Little Nipper traps. It might be b) a mouse got caught, but not killed, and carried the Little Nipper trap off. It's possibly c) a mouse got caught, but next door's cat can get into the loft and took dead mouse, and trap, away to eat it (the mouse not the trap). Or maybe it's d) the mice took the trap away to analyse it in the lab and work out how to defuse future traps.

Either way, I'm off to the hardware store this morning to look at f-off traps. Because when the mice start taking the traps, it feels like they're taking the p---!

Baited with EVIL

Helping out a friend of mine who couldn't get into her loft to deal with roaming rodents, or set the 'little nipper' mousetraps she'd bought, I realised I had to set my animal lover principles on one side for the greater good.

However, I did have to laugh when she explained how she'd broken her self-imposed nearly-two-decade boycott of Evil Nestle to buy the bait. Apparently mice go mad for a Toffee Crisp.

A few minutes after arriving home I got a text to say she'd heard the traps go off. Looks like the little meeses do like the taste of evil after all...