A tenacious little fella has taken up residence in the Tyred household of late and we are now engaged in an amusing but soon-to-be quite tiresome game of trying to get rid of him.
One of my children (the younger one) would just nuke it from orbit, but his older brother wishes to open up a constructive channel of dialogue with the mouse, highly respectful of his mouse rights, to work together towards a mutually acceptable solution to both parties, so I’m not keen to go for a traditional trap… yet.
First approach was to get a humane trap and put peanut butter in it. The mouse is either too stupid or too canny for this to have worked.
Last night we placed a high-sided bucket in the kitchen (he seems to like to hide beneath the kitchen units – our house is old though, and has numerous gaps between floorboards, skirting etc so trapping him in one place is impossible), built a ramp up to it, put a bit of peanut butter at the end of a toilet roll tube and balanced this on the edge of the bucket, the idea being that the mouse goes into the tube which then tips over and lands in the bucket.
Several variations on this theme were attempted last night, as he is interested, but he has foiled us on each occasion, either by moving the tube round then eating the bait and disappearing again, or somehow managing to reach the end of the tube and eating the bait without tipping it over. Am beginning to suspect mouse genius.
Mrs Tyred has been pretty cool with it so far, but that won’t last long. Tyred Jr will be calling me a murderer for months to come if I go for a traditional trap, and my mum refuses to enter our postcode.
So does anyone have any foolproof ideas they’d like to share?
A tempting piece of cheese for the best one!