"Excuse me, where do you have the mousetraps?” my dad asked.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Ummmm, trap mice?”

Sometimes, people can be so dumb…

We looked at their selection of mouse traps and they only had glue traps and traditional mouse traps. We walked out of Home Depot with both kinds.



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One of our neighbors moved out of her house about two months ago. Apparently, she wasn’t one of the cleanest people, and one of the things she left in her memory was a colony of mice. And the mice are migrating.

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"How can you tell we have mice," my Mom asked.

“Mice?”

"I found mouse droppings and a hole by the bag of dogfood in the pantry," my Dad replied.

My Mom's face tightened with anxiety. "We can't have mice in my house!"

“Ok, I’ll have Matt set up glue traps asap.”

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I walked away with a queasy feeling in my stomach. The last thing I wanted to do was to trap mice in glue traps. I hate hate HATE glue traps, and any traps that are cruel in any way. Just thinking that a mouse would get stuck in the glue and adhere itself and be stuck forever and die either of hunger or shock just bothers the hell out of me.

And that’s exactly what happened.

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I had set three glue traps up… two under our fridge and one in the pantry. Under the oven, my Dad set up two actual mouse traps… the ones that snap shut and are supposed to snap a mouse’s back, killing it instantly. But sometimes, the trap doesn’t work perfectly and snaps on the mouse’s tail… or leg… or doesn’t kill it immediately.

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I remained in the kitchen and stared at the traps. I didn’t want to hear them squeal when they got stuck. Or worse, I didn’t want to hear the trap snap shut.

So I walked upstairs and turned on my stereo and went back to studying.

3:00pm. I looked at the clock and my stomach dropped. The traps had been set for a while. Surely something had to have been caught in there.

I looked in the pantry and the glue trap was empty. And then I looked under the fridge.

… and there it was… an itty, bitty mouse… a baby. This mouse was no more than two months old… and its legs and tail were stuck to the glue trap.

My heart sank… and I started to panic. I saw its itty, bitty eyes stricken with fear… and when it saw me, it struggled and freaked out, trapping even more of its fur in the glue. I yelled out for my Dad but he wasn't around.

I picked up the trap and looked at it. And I saw its fear.

So I slowly and carefully pulled each of its legs free until only its tail was stuck and I hovered it above the sink. And then I gently pulled its tail out.

The little critter luckily didn’t have much glue residue stuck to its feet so it ran all around the sink, in a panic.

I grabbed an empty seltzer water bottle and steered it into the mouth and it squeezed in. And I put on the cap. I could see the little guy hyperventilating and I knew I had to get it outside soon.

So I walked quickly outside with the mouse in the bottle, avoiding anyone and everyone, so they didn’t see that I was letting one of the critters go.

Once we got out to a grassy area, I took the cap off the bottle and looked inside. The little mouse had exhausted itself from running around and flipping out, and it was breathing heavily on its side.

I laid the bottle down on the ground and left it on the other side of the fence where no one would see it or kick it, and walked away.

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As soon as I got back inside, I grabbed the other two glue traps and threw them in the garbage and snapped the mouse traps shut, and tossed them in the trash too.

I wanted to yell at my Dad for making me do this. He knows how I detest it, but he's making me go tomorrow to get new traps. But this time I'm going to another store to find humane mouse traps.