I'm master of an animal kingdom

My first port of call was Ealing council, which offers a pest control service for £60. An officer duly spent an hour setting traps and putting down poison, but it had no discernible effect. He returned for a follow-up visit and, after inspecting his empty traps, told me the only sure-fire way to get rid of mice is to get a cat.

Not long afterwards I scooped my four children into the Vauxhall Zafira and we paid a visit to the Mayhew Animal Home in Kensal Rise. After a great deal of deliberation, the children settled on a two-month-old black kitten called Trixie. The effect on the mice population of our house was immediate. Within 24 hours, they had all left.

The only drawback of this method of pest control is that Trixie is now in the habit of catching a mouse in the garden and bringing it back into the house. She then deposits it at my feet, at which point it scurries behind the radiator and all hell breaks loose. My wife leaps up onto the kitchen table, my four-year-old son tries to poke the mouse with a stick and my five-year-old daughter pleads with me to do something.

Unfortunately, the only person capable of extracting the mouse from its hidey-hole is Trixie - and it's not a pretty sight. Until a few months ago, my four children looked on with morbid curiosity as Trixie batted the dying creature across the kitchen floor like a hockey puck, but they've recently discovered Tom and Jerry and now insist that I "rescue" the plucky little rodent. This usually involves a tug of war with the cat that doesn't do the mouse any favours.

One option would be to train the cat not to catch mice, but I suspect the wily creatures would soon work out that she was no longer a threat and move back into the house. On balance, having to deal with four wailing children once a week is preferable to discovering mouse droppings on the kitchen worktop.

The presence of a deadly hunter perched above the washing machine like a sentinel also deters rats from entering the house. Shortly after moving in I pulled down a dilapidated "summer house" at the bottom of the garden that was home to all manner of unsavoury creatures, including a colony of rats. When my wife saw the pack fleeing across the lawn, looking like an undulating blanket of brown fur, she almost fainted. She isn't fond of cats but I think she'd prefer our house to become an annexe of the Mayhew Animal Home rather than risk a single rat poking its nose through the back door.

Toby recommends

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