cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mouse Trap It's a very inbetweenish sort of period right now. I feel like I'm just marking time lately. Waiting for the economy or at least my personal financial fortunes to recover enough to start planning things again. Building the new house, maybe having another baby. Etc. There is a flicker of hope at the moment. My own industry is showing strong signs of prices finally starting to push upwards, with the stuff that my company specializes in becoming in particular demand. We will know for sure by mid April, I think. And I think that we could have real change and increased revenue by June or July. We've had a problem with mice in the house lately. I tried my trusty Tin Cat live catch trap but it's mojo must have worn off. That thing has always worked but for some reason I didn't get a single mouse with it. After a week I gave up and bought some snap traps. The snap traps have been working well but last night I had a bad experience with one and might stop using them because of it. I was sitting at the kitchen table with the toddler, reading him a book. Suddenly I heard the unmistakable 'snap' of a closing trap from underneath the kitchen sink. I got up and opened the cupboard door to see what I had. The trap had closed not on the mouse's head or spine like it should. Rather, it's front leg was caught and broken. Dark red blood spilled out as the tiny animal struggled and kicked. Putting the trap and struggling victim into a plastic grocery bag, I carried it out on to the front porch and set it down. The mouse still struggled desperately. I drew a sharp knife and swiftly cut the mouse's head off. It was the fastest way I could think of to end it's suffering. Shockingly, the body CONTINUED TO KICK AND STRUGGLE without the benefit of it's head, which lay a few inches away and gazed more or less at me with warm black eyes. I apologized to the head for the suffering it had experienced. Now I should mention that this is not the first time I have performed a decapitation of one sort or another (please don't hate me). I am accustomed to the extended writhing of snakes after they have been relieved of their business end by the blast of a shotgun or a revolver (long and brutal story - suffice to say that the snakes had it coming and should have stayed the fuck away from my house). I have also on occasion wrestled with large, dinosaur-like wild turkeys who continued to beat their surprisingly vast wings after I'd shot them and cut their heads off. I'd gotten 2 with one shot that day and was in a hell-fire hurry to get back into my air conditioned car on account of the high pollen count and my brutal allergies outside that day. So there I was trying to stuff these beasts into my backpack as quickly as humanly possible and those headless fuckers just would not cooperate for the longest time. I expect this kind of shit from reptiles and birds and other critters directly or basally close to dinosaurs. Primitive nervous systems and all. But a mammal? DUDE. This is not just a hairy story about something gross. It is a fact that the mouse who was stuck in that trap was an individual with a set of experiences and memories. It had a kind of intelligence. It felt pain and it suffered. The universe would be a slightly better place if the mouse did not have to experience what it went through last night. The fact that the mouse was technically vermin that was shitting in my drawers and chewing open packages of food does not negate the reality of it's furry mammalness or the cruelty of it's suffering. I need to get rid of the mice but that doesn't mean that it's ok to act like they don't matter. What if I hadn't been there to hear the trap snap shut? It could have suffered there for hours. Now I'm not sure what to do. I hesitate to go back to trying live traps, because then what do I do with the captured mice? In warmer weather I'd just walk a long way back into the woods and let them go to start a new life back there. But this is a very cold period of winter. We had an ice storm last night. Dropped into the outdoors without an established nest or food caches or knowledge of food sources or even a clear territory, any released mice would be as good as dead out there. They'd probably freeze to death within 48 hours. Wild rodents do a lot of things to prepare for winter and when you sever them from those preparations they are pretty well fucked. There's no good answer. I am, once again, in this uncomfortable spot where I have to kill. I am trying to be merciful, but no matter what I choose I'm going to be doing some killing. 11:55 a.m. - 2009-01-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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