We have mice. Which I do not approve of.Correction: I do not approve of mice in my house. Despite Dr. Seussical rhyming, mice do not belong where people live, at least not while they still carry hantavirus. Maybe in heaven they will be disease free and we can contemplate their small furriness and twitching noses without spraying them down with Lysol. Until then, they aren't allowed in my attic.
Which leads to my dilemma. We set up traps and hid some poison up in the attic, away from the Man Child of Destruction and Eating Things That are Not Meant to be Eaten. And the practical side of me is content that the mice will soon be gone.
But the other part of me (not that there are only two parts of me - but these are the only two that pertain to mice) is a little stricken by the idea of killing mice. If perhaps there had been a book about giving a rat a cookie ... or if Beatrix Potter had portrayed mice as evil and not put sweet blue waistcoats on them ... maybe if they had red glowing eyes... I don't know.
I'm not even a vegetarian. But MICE. They're LITTLE. And CUTE. And I can just see the little mouse memorial service for the wayward teenage mouse who was warned against the evils of the trap, but didn't heed. Or the groups of maimed and brain-damaged mice in "Poison Eaters Anonymous". Call me ideological, but it's really hard to be responsible for killing cute things.
If only I needed to cause the death of sharks or snakes or spiders or cockroaches or fire ants (I. hate. fire ants.) or fascist, hairless cats... not that I want any of those to infest my house, but at least I wouldn't mind KILLING them.
But isn't that just the way of viruses? Hiding inside cute things to trick you into catching them? I mean, that's how the common cold gets around. Kids are cute, but when you get down to it, they're mainly just snotty factories of disease and malfeasance. Oh man. I came with that word all on my own, too.
But I didn't know how to spell it, so I had to look it up.
My point is, mice are really cute. And I hope they eat the poison but go off somewhere nice (and away from my attic) to die, so that their last hours are spend by the soft murmur of a peaceful stream.
That would help.
2 comments:
I know exactly what you mean. My parents had a mouse in their garage this summer and set traps to catch it. I was scared that I'd see him every time I went out there and kept asking if they'd caught him yet until my mom called him Fievel. Then I cried.
you know how in Titanic those dapper gentlemen in the quartet or whatever continue to play as the ship sinks? Maybe all the dying mice in blue waistcoats can sip their poison in tea by that pleasant river and the mice version of those doomed musicians.
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