Be Nice to Mice
We’ve all heard the story about the poor soul hit by a car, stuck headfirst in the windshield and left to die an agonizing death in the driver’s suburban garage. It was a pretty lousy way to die.
So imagine this: a widow agrees to watch a friend’s acreage while she is in Florida for the winter. Not knowing that her friend’s husband has just finished super gluing some patches to the floor in the garage, her shoe gets stuck the first time she stops by to feed the cat.
Bending over to free her shoe, she gets her hand stuck — followed by her other hand and finally, after falling awkwardly sideways, her shoulder, her back and her hair. Writhing helplessly, glued to the floor, the elderly woman is unable to free herself.
Nobody knows she’s there because she swung by impulsively on her way home from the mall. Nobody hears hers screams because she is more than a mile from the nearest acreage. Nobody notices she is missing because she is a widow who lives alone and never carries a cell phone.
It is early spring, in fact, before the friends return from Florida to find her dried, shriveled, contorted remains glued to the floor of the garage.
Sound like an urban legend? It is actually. As far as I know, it never happened.
There was no glue. There was no widow. There was no winter trip to Florida. But every spring this cruel fate — this slow, painful, awful, ugly death — is suffered by animals stuck to glue boards placed by exterminators in urban sheds and garages.
I bring this up now because it is autumn in the city. Every day the breeze blows a little cooler. Every night the mercury dips a little lower. The degree of change is slow but steady, almost imperceptible to busy people distracted by the hectic schedule of a new school year.
I bring this up now because while sleepy urbanites are herding children into their Chevy Ventures, while they are crawling through the weak light of the morning rush staring into the foggy clouds spewing from the exhaust pipes ahead of them, mice, voles, shrews and other rodents are creeping around the foundations of their empty homes and garages looking for a sheltered place to spend the coming winter.
This is the eternal rhythm of the urban ecosystem. Every autumn bugs vanish, leaves turn yellow, geese fly south, bears hibernate and mice start looking for a safe place to live out the winter. They don’t need much; an opening no bigger than the tip of your little finger and a bag of pet food will do.
“There is no way of placing a monetary value on human suffering and damage caused by mice,” says Alberta Agriculture, Food and Rural Development’s website. “The greatest loss is probably not what mice eat, but what is wasted and contaminated.”
Indeed mice and their parasites, adds the website, “are implicated in the transmission of a number of diseases including salmonellosis, rickettsialpox and most recently hantavirus.” And if that were not bad enough, mice “also carry many types of tapeworms and roundworms, infectious to pets and humans.”
Now I have never suffered the skin rash associated with rickettsialpox, but I don’t imagine that it’s a very pleasant thing to live through. Nor have I ever experienced the shortness of breath, coughing and eventual cardiopulmonary arrest caused by hantavirus. But I don’t see either of these things as any more horrifying than dying a slow death glued to the floor of someone’s garage.
In fact, I don’t really see the need for anyone — mouse, man or woman — to die over something as silly as a carelessly sealed bag of dog food. We all know the rhythm of life. We all know what happens in the fall. It happens every year.
“Prevention is the best strategy,” says the U.S. Center for Disease Control, “and it simply means taking some very practical steps to minimize your contact with rodents.” Lock away potential food sources, hide possible nesting materials and seal all holes and openings larger than 6 mm (1/4 in.) across.
“Mice generally enter buildings at ground level through very small openings and can be found anywhere from the basement to the attic,” says the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies. “They will build nests in the space between double walls, floor joists and concealed, enclosed spaces in cupboards or under counters.” The first line of defence, therefore, “is to rodent-proof the building to prevent more animals from coming in.”
Alternatively, we can do nothing. We can wait until spring. We can call the Orkin Man who will — at some considerable financial cost — put out some glue boards or traps or poisons to kill the rodents and their offspring who have left droppings scattered like sticky flecks of black pepper in the hidden corners behind our kitchen cabinets.
By then, though, it will be too late and we will have to make a choice. Either clean up the mess ourselves or pay someone to do it for us. Either risk inhaling a virus that could kill us or pay someone else to take that risk for us. Either way, it’s a lousy choice to have to make — especially considering that it is one we could have avoided making in the first place.
———-
© Brent Johner. Originally published in the Calgary Herald, September 2003. Reprint rights available.
Related posts from Nature's Corner:
Brent Johner has been writing about urban wildlife since 1998. Many of the articles here first appeared in the Calgary Herald, Calgary Gardening magazine or on Talk About Wildlife. Brent has also done dozens of radio, television, newspaper and magazine interviews on the subject of urban wildlife.