What Would You Do?

We have mice in the house. The other morning there was a fairly large one stuck in Mom and Dad's bathtub and Lindsay had heard one scrambling around in the kitchen. So naturally we set up a few mouse traps. The mouse in the kitchen was very elusive. For about 3 nights in a row we set the traditional trap and each morning the cheese would be gone with the trap still ready to spring. My parents accused me of playing a trick on them....which I didn't, but wish I had. Anyway, we took the battle up to the next level. We bought tar traps. I won't go into too much detail, but the tar trap is basically a flat piece of plastic with a small indentation for a thin layer of tar-like substance. Another night went by and we still weren't catching the little rodents. Last night we finally showed our unconquerable strategic decision making abilities and surrounded the traditional trap with 4 tar traps. The only way to get to the cheese was through the tar. Before the lights had gone out we had our mouse. Now here's the moral dilemma I faced. He was stuck in the tar, but still very alive and terrified. Having tar stuck to his feet and his nosed buried in the sticky stuff was his fate sealed? Did we have to find another way to finish him off? I didn't think I was up for the task, but my dad's eyes clearly said, "Your free rent this month depends on you taking care of this mess." So here were my options (parental discretion advised...the following suggestions may not be appropriate for young children).

1. Go find a shovel and "finish it off"

2. Drown the mouse (Dad's meek suggestion)

3. Burn the mouse (Anna's suggestion...but apparently she was suggesting that it be cremated and the ashes be scattered out of respect after the ordeal was over....not as a way to kill the mouse)

4. Let someone else deal with it (Lindsay's suggestion)

5. Just throw the trap and mouse in the garbage and assume it will either freeze, starve, or suffocate.

6. Surgically remove the mouse from the tar pad using a razor blade and set it "free". (Anna thought that it would be appropriate to set it free in the McDonald's dumpster for enduring our shup with the dramatic night).

So most of the options didn't seem that humane, and I decided to go with the last. I used the broadside of a pencil to hold the mouse down in the snow (Dad helped some too) and then I, paw by paw, released the mouse from the tar trap. The mouse clenched the pencil with its teeth (as if this was some real surgery that was being done without any sort of pain killer and the only way it could bear the pain was to sink its teeth into the soft # 2 pencil).

I'm sure this was much more dramatic than it ever had to be. I released the mouse from the tar, but couldn't get the tar off its feet. He was stuck to the cold concrete and probably not going to make it anyway. Oh yeah, and I think I also surgically removed a few of his toes on the last remaining paw. As I tossed the little guy into the field I wondered if I should have just knocked him out with the shovel at the beginning....but I just couldn't. So what would you have done? We may have more mice, so I'll probably be faced with this decision again.

Maybe we should find a live mouse trap so we can keep them. Mom would love that. Then we could feed them to our new pet snake.