UTMC

And we got sick of sharing the space with them, so we bought traps.
This is after catching several by work gloved hand, and turning them loose in a field, mind you, as I typically don't like killing stuff until it's either A) in my bed (only sometimes happens with women, but I digress) or B) going to be on my dinner plate (see part A).

Anyway, if the little bastards would stay in the walls or the attic like they've been doing for months on end, then I couldn't really give a shit less that they're in the house. They recently hit a critical mass, however, and started invading our bedrooms and kitchen.

No kill traps are like private dining rooms, where the mice are free to eat in comfort and then leave at will, so now we're down to DIE MOTHERFUCKER traps.

I just now heard the full details of a rodent leaving this plane, and my brain managed to put such a macabre spin on it that I had to write it here, because, well, it's so depressing that it actually made me laugh.

>>>>
Listening to their little death throes as they thrash their last against the washing machine is kind of depressing. I wonder if they're still aware as I pry the traps off their broken necks and drop their limp little bodies in the trash can.
I can almost imagine what that chain of events must be like, with the split second of instant panic, followed by the overwhelming numbness and the realization that this is it, and nothing is getting you out of it.
And then I wonder again if they're still aware when I pry the traps off their broken necks and drop their limp little bodies in the trash can. Life, just like that, unceremoniously ending at the bottom of a filthy curbside waste bin.
I wonder if it will be something like that when I die, with only the last instant to realize that I've made a horrible mistake that nothing is going to get me out of, followed by an unknown number of agonizing moments with the awareness that my last fading thread of consciousness is slipping inexorably into the unknown darkness.
I guess once it goes, though, it doesn't matter what kind of hole you're at the bottom of.
At least I hope not.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

This, ladies and gentlemen, is what honestly just happened inside my brain.

I think I need a goddamned vacation, and maybe therapy. Not because of the mouse... Because of the kind of shit a stupid mouse can make me THINK of.

Mice, fleas, and I would guess any other fast breeding varmint you don't want living in your house must be dealt with IMMEDIATELY upon discovery of THE FIRST ONE.
Really, if you let the little fuckers alone they will take over, I won't bore you with gory details, just trust me. At the first sign of mice, or fleas, a SCORCHED EARTH POLICY must be enacted. Set traps, boil your laundry, whatever it takes, live and let live is all cool and all, but those little disease carrying vermin need to live somewhere else.
I'm cool with spiders though, go figure.

My apartment is in the kind of creaky, grand old house that is basically a perfect habitat for mice- spaces, voids, holes everywhere- its easy to imagine them in elaborate little households inside the walls, wearing little velvet jackets and swordfighting with cocktail skewers, but apparently there are none- In all the years I've lived here neither of my cats has had the opportunity to bring me one.

I had to deal with mice and fleas at our last apartment after the nice wooded area behind us was developed for condos and all the mice moved in to the apartment with us. At first I did not realize they were there till they simply started taking food from our plates, unafraid of us. My landlord was trying to poison them but I insisted on humane traps, did not want to smell the rotting corpse in my walls all summer and my wife insisted on not killing them. I set sticky pads, got them all in less than a week and relocated them across the river.

Flea infestation was due to a new downstairs neighbor and her mutts, after few weeks of suffering we set off a bunch of bug bombs and left for couple days. Upon return vacuumed every inch of carpet and washed all the other surfaces and dishes. Fleas were gone and once we had an opportunity to buy a house we were to!

No mice or fleas at the house but I have been evicting spiders for couple years, one or two a night, just throw them outside but couple days ago couple hundred of them hatched in my kitchen somewhere and I have been just swatting them of the sealing. Also GIANT black ants, about half inch long, probably carpenter ants, not sure. I'm about to declare war and nuke the whole place with some bug spray...

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Rusty sez: Ring that dinner-bell!

WAFS, you are a compassionate soul, and I respect that. However, it seems you have come to the point of them or us. Pure self preservation. Burn baby burn!

Oh man, speaking of cats...

So my roommates have this cat, right, and at first I actually liked him, which is odd, coz I'm NOT a cat person.

That liking him part wore off when he pissed on my bed, the little fucker.
It's the only real bed I've ever owned, and I've only had it for about 3 years. Needless to say that soured our relationship a bit.

Anyway, so here I'm thinking "Ok, we've got mice. The cat has a frickin BELL on his collar, so that doesn't help. The mice can hear him coming a mile away, and as a result, he's got NO CLUE they're even here." So I grab some pliers, and free him from his chiming neck annoyance.
I then proceed to open pathways for him to wherever I see mice running and/or hiding. We've got the piano pulled out from the wall, the bottom drawer taken off the oven, open spaces in the bookcase, etc.

To date he's chased after ONE mouse, and didn't catch it.
At one point, we had a mouse cornered, showed the cat, and he just sauntered off to his dinner bowl.
I caught the damned thing by hand, took both the cat and the mouse outside, dangled the mouse by the tail and enticed the cat with it until he got interested, then set the mouse loose.
The cat caught him about three times, then let him go, then lost him.
When we caught the first mouse in the trap, I put it in the cat's food bowl about 2 minutes after it died.
The damned cat grabbed it, carried it around for a couple of minutes, dropped it, and ran outside. I threw the dead mouse AT the cat. Cat pounces on mouse, looks at it, walks away.
Dead mouse is still where I threw it.

Goddamned cat is useless. USELESS I tell ya, USELESS.

I'm wishing I had my little brother's cat. It's given name is "Popokee," but my brother calls him "Killtastic murder machine." ...for a reason.
We wouldn't have any goddamned mice if THAT cat was around.

Stop feeding the cat.

MATPOC wrote:probably carpenter ants, not sure.

It's the electrician and plumber ants that can really do a number on ya

That headspace you're in Brothah WAFS, I hear you on that. On my ride to Colorado and back, every time I saw roadkill I thought "that might be me in five minutes, live it up". My reaction to this thought a decade ago would have been to whack the throttle ball to the jack and ride like a madman - both for the thrill of the ride and that of egging fate on. This time though, I just kept steady, and it felt like resting my hand on a hot surface. Over time it just became natural to see what was there, rather than force it out of my mind. As much as we try and deny it, everything just is, it's a crapshoot. Today is good.

Sisyphus wrote:Stop feeding the cat.

+1000!

@ Matpoc,
I forget the name of the product, but there's a powder you can lay down where the ants either are running or, if you're patient and evil like me, on their nest that they find to be delicious but is actually designed to poison the nest from within. Give that a try, let the ants do your dirty work for you, and avoid the aerosol stuff.

I was the first person out of about 100 to say "stop feeding the cat." It's funny, coz EVERYONE who knows us, and knows we have a cat, says that as soon as they find out we have mice. If he's hungry, he will hunt. Alas, my roommates aren't going in for that idea, and it's their cat.

I've used the ant powder before, and it's pretty good stuff. Wipe down their trails with dilute bleach solution, too. Another home remedy I've heard is corn meal. Supposedly they'll eat it, but can't digest it, and it kills 'em. It didn't work for me, but my ants were teeny tiny little bastards, so the corn meal might have just been too big for 'em.

I've also heard of a person who, just for fun, laid down pieces of paper wherever he saw ant trails. He'd lay one down, let them walk across it, then turn it so the trail pointed a different direction and lay down another piece of paper where the trail now pointed, then he'd turn that one and repeat the process. After a while, he had pointed their trail right back out the door and into the garden.

...or you could just kill 'em.


And yeah, all too often I'm keenly aware that I could be roadkill at any moment. I've been pretty vocal about that on the boards for the past few years. That's one reason (out of many) that I'm trying to switch mainly to dirt and track whenever possible. I might be more likely to fall down and go boom, but falling down and gong boom into a gravel pit is on orders of magnitude better than falling down and going boom underneath an SUV or into a bunch of trees.

A no-kill mousetrap that actually works:

Take the cardboard tube core of a roll of toilet paper.
Place it on the edge of a kitchen worktop or similar elevated surface. Place a book or a can or something else moderately heavy on either side to keep the tube from being pushed sideways or twisted.
Place the bait in the end that is over the deep end.
Place a high-walled container underneath (wastepaper basket is good, some kind of barrel is better. Those fuckers can JUMP). Make sure it's empty and the inside walls are smooth. Cardboard is counter-indicated here.

Mouse goes for bait, crawls into tube, cardboard tube tips, mouse falls into container and will wait to be collected. It's about the simplest mechanical device there is.
The only failure mode I'm aware off would be the mouse pushing the tube over the edge when it tries to get in. No hinges, springs, triggers or other nonsense that can go wrong.

actually you have to TRAIN your cat to mouse. if they are domesticated they didn't learn from the mother cat, most likely.

just catch a live mouse, or buy one and give it to the cat as a toy. once the cat learns that inside the playful fur is a tasty snack they will do what comes naturally. every cat i've ever had i had to train like this and it worked just fine. the knowledge that inside the fur is a tasty morsel isn't instinctive.

and a well-fed cat will still hunt mice, small rats, and squirrels, and it will be for the sheer joy that fresh meat and the hunt gives them.

I dunno. I've had cats that go either way. Simon, rest his little black soul, killed all sorts of stuff and ate it. Snakes, worms, mice, chipmunks. Gustav, on the other hand would paw at a mouse for awhile, lose interest, and go take a nap. He had to retire on medical grounds. His assistant and successor, Otis, poor little chap, also killed everything he could. Mostly to eat, but sometimes because he was something of a serial killer. He met a fate similar to Simon a few weeks ago, but no autopsy was performed since crawling under the shed to fetch his stinking body was enough of a courtesy.

We need to hire a new cat; summer is getting on and both my wife and I have seen rats.

Well, my dearly departed pussy used to bring mice into the house, then release them. Chasing them around indoors is so much more fun than outside, apparently. One time, he brought in two in one week, followed by three birds the next week. After that, we put a bell on him, so he just started killing birds with his mind (we had two slam into our window within a few weeks).

My grandad had a dog, Charlie Brown, that was a rodent killing machine. We'd be out hiking through the hills of eastern Oregon and every few hundred yards or so come across a ground squirrel he'd left for us on the trail with it's brain case neatly punctured. They had a roll away dishwasher under which a mouse would occasionally take refuge. Charlie would alert us to the intruders presence by dashing back and forth between where ever we were in the house and the kitchen with his ears and tail sticking straight up until someone went in and gave him a hand.

Carpenter ants look just like this little guy.

Some folks I know made this.
One night we decided (while drunk) that it would be a good idea to light a few road flares around where the big safe falls at the end, then put a bunch of propane and kerosene bottles underneath the safe.
Needless to say, paramedics were involved.

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Sisyphus wrote:Stop feeding the cat.

That, and borrow your brother's cat for a few weeks.

I have zero sympathy for vermin in the house, be they roaches, mice, fleas, whatever. Kill traps go out the first day I see something in the living space, because when you see the first one out in the open, there's probably a shitload more you can't see.

Carpenter ants are large (.25 to 1 in/0.63 to 2.5 cm) ants indigenous to many parts of the world. They prefer dead, damp wood in which to build nests. They do not eat it, however, unlike termites.[1] Sometimes carpenter ants will hollow out sections of trees. The most likely species to be infesting a house in the United States is the Black carpenter ant, Camponotus pennsylvanicus. However, there are over a thousand other species in the genus Camponotus.

Black carpenter ants do not eat or digest wood, but they tunnel through wood, which can cause structural damage....

Reducing moisture will not eliminate an established colony. One can spray the insects with common household insecticides to kill them, but this is unlikely to penetrate enough to reliably kill the colonies deep in the wood. Since it is likely that the wood housing the main nest is no longer structurally sound, the complete removal of the nest is recommended.

My dad had to replace the main beam cause it had carpenter ant colony in it!


here's were it gets interesting

Exploding ants

In at least nine Southeast Asian species of the Cylindricus complex, including Camponotus saundersi, workers feature greatly enlarged mandibular glands that run the entire length of the ant's body. They can release their contents suicidally, rupturing its body and spraying toxic substance from the head, which gave these species the common name "exploding ants."[5] [6][7] The ant has an enormously enlarged mandibular (abdomen) gland, many times the size of a normal ant, which produces the glue. The glue bursts out and entangles and immobilizes all nearby victims. [8][9]

The termite species Globitermes sulphureus has a similar defensive mechanism

[/quote]

A long time ago, I worked at a garage down in Athens, GA. I shared the space with this riot of a man, named Andreas. I called him Herr Bubba, because he had recently moved from Germany, but had turned full-on redneck. He frosted his hair, and looked exactly like Rod Stewart. Anyway, he was a mechanical genious, and on this day, he was replacing ball joints on an old VW bus. They are a press fit, but to save the trouble of removing the suspension arm, he liked to destroy the old ball joint to get it out, and then put the new ball joint in liquid nitrogen to shrink it so it would drop in. It just happened that his little dog caught a mouse that day, and Andreas had a sick idea. He went and wrestled the mouse away from the dog, held it by its tail with pliers, and lowered it flailing away, into the liquid nitrogen. As you'd guess, it froze instantly. Then he dropped it on the floor, and it broke into many, many pieces, which promptly thawed. Then the dog got to eat his catch after all. We tried freezing other things, but nothing else had the impact of the mouse. I miss Andreas, so many stories from that guy.

^^^ jangleplatz!