mouse hunt

one of my favorite movies when i was a kid was mouse hunt, but let me tell you now that trapping mice is a lot less fun than the movie made it seem.

a few weeks ago, we had our property manager set traps around the kitchen and front closet because we had discovered that a mouse had eaten a good 1/8th of my favorite beautiful tapestry that hung on the wall between the kitchen & front hall. we hadn't noticed because there was a shelving unit in front of it (full of other things of mine like my extensive collection of thousands of precious cupcake liners i've collected over the years, completely shredded. i cried over those.)

we caught one pretty early on, a couple of weeks ago. it got snap trapped & i threw it out. it was gross, but he didn't suffer so it was fine. yesterday a mouse crawled into daniella's shoes by her door, and i trapped it in a trashcan before transferring it to our terrarium container with some food & water. (we're taking him to a huge park several miles away from here tomorrow.) tonight, another mouse got stuck to a glue trap we nudged a little bit from its usual position. and of course it squealed and cried and tried to rip itself off the trap, so daniella came and got me from my room to help her.

she wanted to pry it off the trap, not understanding how strong the glue is. she didn't want it to suffer, but she didn't want me to kill it either. she was scared for it to die. so she called her parents, who got upset at us for not using no-kill traps. (can you imagine the deadpan look on my face right now?)

i was thinking how daniella & her parents must think i'm such a hardened, horrible person to be able to drown a mouse stuck to a glue trap (by the sounds of the call, it's the impression i got. maybe it's not true at all.) but i think part of the problem with it was maybe our difference in spirituality--daniella is an athiest, and i'm not at all. i think that she holds a very high reverence for life & not harming other creatures, as do i. and i'm not trying to say that athiests don't in general. but i think that maybe her belief that life and death are black & white equips her with a fear of death that i don't have.

that's not saying that i want to die or think that it will be easy when my time comes. but i was raised knowing that life doesn't end with death. i was raised communicating with my "dead" grandparents and great uncle. i can even hear my family's voices reciting that 4th principle during service, "we affirm that the existence and personal identity of the the individual continue after the change called death." i don't know what i think about mice going to heaven or whatever, but i do think that my remorse was enough to honor his little life, and it's part of the circle.

everything is a lesson, and i'm glad that the mouse gave his life so i could grasp the concept of holding life and death in my hands and giving the poor little dude serenity when he needed it.


(that's not to say that the other five glue traps positioned around my house are staying, because they're not. i could do it all again if i needed to, but i don't want to witness that suffering again.)