Morning:
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When I moved into my new house a year ago I quickly discovered that the phrase "vacant possession" shouldn't be taken at face value. The human occupants had gone but the rodents remained. The place was completely infested with mice.
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
Dovecote Park Aberdeen Angus Rump Steaks: Sold in packets of six from Waitrose, these are some of the best steaks
available in London.
Reader views (1)
I have an avid mouser/ratter too. We have had 14 years of this.
The trick is to leave a couple of old kitchen roll middles up against a wall very near where she drops them. They can then run along the wall to shelter in them. You then put a hand or whatever each end and take the mouse filled tube away. Where to is up to you of course, but it does avoid the Roman circus of murder which can follow, and having to spend ages 'saving'.
I will try to put a recuced version of this on Twitter, for other Mouse Rescuers. Good luck.
- Theodora Wayte, Uppingham Rngland, 30/03/2009 12:46
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