If you’re of a certain age, you might, in the dim recesses of your mind, remember the Pixie and Dixie cartoons, created by the Hanna-Barbera animators. They were two sly mice who regularly outsmarted Mr. Jinks, the hapless cat. He would invariably yell, “I hate those meeses to pieces!” Hanna-Barbera also created the Tom and Jerry cartoons, which to my taste, was the better of the two. It had almost no dialog, but you could tell that Jerry the mouse never tired of foiling Tom.
Those cartoons showed the mice as cute, clever, and ever victorious over the large feline, and in these scenarios, humans were largely absent, making the cat responsible for rodent removal. Looking at old cartoons can be an exercise in chagrin. I can now recognize racist and sexist attitudes aplenty — and all that clobbering! Yes, those cartoons were violent, but as a kid, I was never inspired to hit someone in the face with a spade or drop an anvil from a cliff.
Many of us feel violently toward real mice, however, and with some right. While they provide food for predators and help spread seeds, they are right persistent critters once they move indoors. Spades and anvils aren’t much good in the battle of mice versus women. Traps don’t always succeed either.
Mice like to establish themselves in houses when Fall sets in, but they aren’t fussy. Workplaces will suffice, too. I remember seeing a metal box under my dad’s desk at the hardware store. In the cold months, we’d hear a thunk! from time to time as a mouse wandered into the galvanized house of death. With people coming and going out of the front door and my dad unloading freight or going on a service call, there were bound to be cases of rodentiis interloperus.*
One could expect it in such a dusty, little town, surrounded by fields; it’s a bit harder to accept in a hall of learning. My work colleagues on the floor above me have been fighting the good fight against Genus mus ever since the weather turned cold.
The Hanna-Barbera cartoonists had at least one thing right: Mice are wily. Kathy Heuton set out two unwrapped Hershey’s kisses on a sticky trap, and shortly thereafter, one of the chocolatey mounds had been whittled to a stub. The day after that, the trap had been turned 90 degrees, and the rodent(s) had polished off the second stack, leaving only quarter-sized brown circles in their wake.
It’s said that mice hate aluminum foil. It might have been worthwhile to experiment with one wrapped kiss and one unwrapped. Next time, Kathy? What am I saying? We don’t ever want there to be a “next time.”
A few office doors away, Sarah Johnson experienced her own mice capades with a box of fancy chocolates. The mice dislodged the top of the box, then removed the crinkly protective paper and set to feasting on chocolate wafers. Sarah reported that the mice sampled the dark chocolate wafers, but they heartily devoured the milk chocolate ones.
Crafty though they be, mice must not know about the dark chocolate’s benefits of flavanol and antioxidants. It’s ultimately immaterial, though. Chocolate is toxic to cats and dogs and mice, and the mice’s cacao spree resulted in at least one death, but the evidence showed up on my floor, in one of my sticky traps.
I have nothing so yummy as Hershey’s kisses or chocolate wafers to offer, so they feasted upstairs and came to die in the archives. There’s something creepily fitting in their choice of final resting place, but I prefer not to delve too far into mice metaphysics. Let dead mice lie, I say, until it’s time to throw out the sticky trap.
*Not a true scientific name, of course, but if the Roadrunner cartoons could do it, so can I.
Joan Zwagerman doesn’t like mice, but she especially hates bats or as she prefers to call them, mice with wings.
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