That's right, whilst in the midst of a manic cleaning session due to being left alone in the house for too long alone I managed to suck a mouse up the hose of the Dyson.
In my defence - I was not trying to get it, I had lifted up the draught excluder and was running the hose along the gap and 'thwup' it went up the hosepipe. I thought I had broken the Dyson then, that it would be stuck in the hose, but it went all the way through into the cyclone bit. It did not survive the trip.
At this point it is fair to say that I am almost ready to admit defeat with the mice in our house. The current population explosion is the unforseen result of losing 3 of our excellent mousers in a 6 month period, and we now have Mr Pink and the kittens.
Mr Pink has obviously declared the house a neutral zone and kills nothing inside as well as being utterly fazed by the number of mice currently occupying condominiums in our haystacks - he does all his mousing in next door's barn instead.
Pond and Ferguson are too little still to have got the hang of mousing effectively, and they are also observing the current demilitarised zone inside the house.
The mice are out of control. They stampede uninhibited across the beams, along the floors and sit and sneer from the pantry shelves. Every night it is a mousey disco and they invite another multitude over for nibbles and drinks as the sun goes down. Very soon I expect them to comandeer control of the TV remote and dictate the evening's viewing, I dread checking the phone bill for long distance calls to their mousey cousins due to arrive for their holidays soon. As the toxicity levels in the poisons go up, they find ever more imaginative routes into the house thwarting my every attempt to impede their passage with malevolent morsels. Most recently they have developed quite a taste for the exotic, eating curry powders in lieu of the fancy poison pate left temptingly on view.
The latest inroad has been made in my buffet. They have gnawed a hole in the corner and set to the medicine box. Obviously the poison must have been upsetting their poor little tummies so they have eaten a packet of Immodium, no worries about hay-fever, they have set about Brendan's loratadine, and for the morning after the night before, a box of paracetamol. Either that or we have a new breed of hypercondriac mice.
OK - holes blocked up in the furniture, new poison packets distributed. Sit back and wait......
2 comments:
Is it wrong that I could just see a little mouse floating around in the cyclone, clicking it's heels together and yelling "Auntie Em, Auntie Em!"
There is no real cure for a mouse problem. They have a collapsible skull so can squeeze through the tiniest of holes.
I suggest starving the cats until they get with the programme! Well maybe not starve but would reducing any regular feed make Mr Pink a bit more tempted to mousey violence?
Other wise tid bits in humane traps. Then its up to you to do the dispatching. I would choose humane traps as they seem to work better than the traditional ones. Place them against walls and along known routes and hope.
Sadly there are good reasons why pests become so, it's because they tend to be very adaptable.
Luckily the kittens are showing signs of being mousers, the only problem that we have is that we try to teach them that the house is off limits because at certain times of the year we have numerous boxes of chicks, ducklings and baby rabbits around that we don't want them to kill, but unfortunately it is harder to teach them that mouse death is acceptable when we ban other deaths.
Mr Pink does hunt - he just tends to do it next door for some reason. I can't complain about him too much because the one thing that he does catch here is moles and so the garden is relatively mole free.
Can't have everything I guess, and this way I have an excuse to keep going to car boots to buy pretty tins to store things in.
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