Do you like this story?
Call of the wild, in miniature
By Dr. Marty Becker
January 15, 2010
I know I talk all the time about the majestic glory of the Idaho mountains, the elk, the deer, the wolves and all the wildlife that makes its home with us here at Almost Heaven Ranch.
And then there are the mice.
First, there’s something you have to understand. My Dad’s family were hunting guides in the vast wilderness area around Salmon, Idaho where he grew up. I grew up hunting, and knew how to handle guns from an early age.
All through the years I was in college, I loved to hunt waterfowl and upland game, and have shot an elk as well as a deer or two. I never liked the taste of wild game, and certainly didn’t hunt for the meat, as we lived on a farm and ranch and had all the beef and chicken a large freezer could hold.
No, I hunted for the sport, and especially loved working with and watching our hunting dogs strut their genetic exuberance for tracking, setting, flushing, and retrieving.
But everything changed when I went to veterinary school. Once I saw animals shot and suffering, I never picked up a gun to hunt again. I still enjoy going out with my son to trap shoot clay pigeons or for target practice, but I can’t shoot any animal, no matter what damage he’ll do or how much of a threat he is.
Which brings us to the mice.
Mice come into our log home. Who can blame them, when in the late fall and winter temperatures are frequently in the single digits, and inside it’s 73 degrees with a bulging pantry? Considering a mouse can enter through a hole the size of a pencil eraser (no kidding), it’s impossible plug a log home tight enough to stop them.
Since I can’t kill them, my family has had to come up with other solutions, and mine is a live trap called a Ketch-All. You can hear the mice enter the oval shaped opening in the side of the trap, which triggers a paddle to flip them into a chamber.
We have six of these traps in our house, but 95 percent of the mice are caught in the trap just inside our front door. It’s very convenient, because I can easily hear the trap flip from my bedroom at 3 in the morning, and go running out to let the mouse back outside.
I usually don’t have to do that more than once in a night, but some mice are more persisent — or maybe just more collapsible — than others. I was sure this one little mouse was getting in over and over, so I marked him with a little red paint. I caught him six more times after that.
My wife Teresa is an even bigger animal lover than I am, and asks me to take the mice away from the house and turn them loose in the woods. But I don’t know, it just doesn’t seem right to me.
No, I just drop them outside the front door. I do that because there’s lots of cover in the flower beds and lots of sunflower seeds from the wild bird feeders for them to eat, and fresh water to drink from the dog’s heated outdoor bowls.
And yes, I do it because I’m in my underwear and it’s 3 in the morning and 7 degrees out.
All that is, I guess, the animal lover in me, but my last mouse story is about the veterinarian in me.
One time about two years ago, we had been gone for a couple of days and came home to find a mouse in the trap that was in shock and near death.
I gave the mouse heated sub-Q fluids and a dab of a steroid in his leg. Then I put him in the pocket of my insulated overalls to warm up and took him with me around the barn as I did chores. Once he heated up, got rehydrated and the steroids kicked in, he was running around my pocket like it was a race track.
Not wanting to leave him in the barn for the barn cats to stalk and attack, I took him back to the garage and put him in a box with bedding, a heating pad, food and water. I went out an hour later to check on him and he was gone. Probably already back in our house.
Share & Enjoy
|
Facebook
|
Twitter
|
Google Buzz
|
Digg
|
|
Technorati
|
StumbleUpon
|
Delicious
|
Email
|
Home
Thanks for the “tiny” glimpse into the animal-lover life you lead. I myself am particularly fond of the white-footed mouse. I think it can be downright beautiful, when healthy and sleek, with it’s brindle fur and cute white legs and belly.
Comment by Rori — January 15, 2010 @ 7:00 am
That is flat out priceless! The visual of you shooing a mouse outside, in frigid weather, in the middle of the night, in your underwear, proves your bona fides. This post made my morning.
Comment by David S. Greene — January 15, 2010 @ 8:10 am
This is such a sweet story. It warms my heart to know that there are others out there that value even the tiniest life. Thanks.
Comment by Nydia — January 15, 2010 @ 8:10 am
what a nice change from the usual “rodents don’t matter; they’re only pests” posts we usually get
Comment by EmilyS — January 15, 2010 @ 8:22 am
Now you guys are getting an idea why I love working with this man. :)
Comment by Gina Spadafori — January 15, 2010 @ 8:31 am
You have to be careful with New World mice and rats. They are often carriers of hantavirus.
Comment by retrieverman — January 15, 2010 @ 9:00 am
Oh such a sweet post. I had a little house mouse as an adopted friend when I was a little girl and then as an older child, I had a white rat we kept in a cage - Whiskers.
As long as field mice and rats stay outside, all is well. I wouldn’t purposefully kill a little mouse but rats around the house, those need to be exterminated and I have no problem doing them in.
Comment by Snoopy's Friend — January 15, 2010 @ 9:45 am
It probably won’t get the play the wolf posts did, but I gotta say, the whole image of him tenderly nursing that trapped mouse back to health… ack. Love it!
Comment by Christie Keith — January 15, 2010 @ 10:49 am
Best story of the day! Thanks, Dr. Becker.
Comment by Glenye Oakford — January 15, 2010 @ 11:28 am
Removing ground cover from around your house (anything like thick vines or shrubs that provide complete cover), and moving the bird feeders would probably knock down the mouse in the house problem.
Ivy ground covers and any other solid ground cover next to buildings are lovely places for rats, too.
Flowers and spaced out plants are less attractive to mice.
Comment by compcat — January 15, 2010 @ 3:56 pm
I’m questioning if Dr. Becker considers it a “problem” or not, LOL… he might not want to make his landscaping less hospitable for his “little friends.” ;)
Comment by Christie Keith — January 15, 2010 @ 4:34 pm
Love the image of you with the mouse in your pocket !
Comment by Leslie K — January 15, 2010 @ 4:49 pm
“I’m questioning if Dr. Becker considers it a “problem” or not, LOL… he might not want to make his landscaping less hospitable for his “little friends.” ;)
Comment by Christie Keith — January 15, 2010 @ 4:34 pm”
Just what I was thinking as I was reading your post, Dr. Becker, which I found very enjoyable! I have either white footed or deer mice or both in my old farmhouse. As long as they nest in the woodshed, eat spilled seed from the bird feeders, stay in the attic and don’t come into my part of the house, I have no quarrel with them. They will feed the milk snakes, foxes, hawks, falcons, owls, and coyotes and keep the cycle going. Although I have minimal veterinary skills, were I to find one in need of help I’d do my best to save it. I have been known to provide sugar water for early appearing bees in the spring before many of the trees have started to flower. I hate seeing a cold, shivering pollinator running out of energy! Did I mention the nursery colony of little brown bats that also live in the space under the ridgepole which they access through mouse sized impossible to find teensy holes? While I am not thrilled about bat guano piled over my head above my plaster ceiling, my bats are the best mosquito control device ever. I hope they return in May, unaffected by white nose disease.
Comment by Anne T — January 15, 2010 @ 6:26 pm
jesus c—- a hole the size of a pencil eraser??? trying to catch some mice with hav-a-hearts now. have caught four so far and know at least one more is in house. one died before release….
Comment by sara — January 15, 2010 @ 6:47 pm
What an awesome, lovely, heart-warming story from a wonderfully gifted and kind-hearted man. Thank you, Dr. Becker!
Comment by A.C. — January 15, 2010 @ 6:57 pm
AnneT, you can migrate your bats to a bat house so you don’t have the guano problem. Go to http://www.batcon.org/index.php/bats-a-people.html
Comment by EmilyS — January 15, 2010 @ 7:31 pm
EmilyS, I have bat houses in all my trees, placed about 25 feet up. I suspect some of my colony are using them, but they really really love the space between the ridgepole and the ceilings. The vents have screening to keep them out, but at dusk on a midsummer’s eve, you should watch the moms leave in droves to hunt insects. Howver, I will check out and mark your link!
The colony is females and their young. The males roost separately, usually singly or in small groups in a tree somewhere. All bat species in my state are protected, and I have spent a significant amount of time on teh webs looking for in-state help. Alas, nothing in life is free, and I can’t afford what it would cost me to relocate my bats.
What I have done is appraise the state that I have a colony, and that they are more than welcome to monitor it for white nosed fungus disease. Unfortunately due to our current financial crunch, that isn’t about to happen.
Comment by Anne T — January 15, 2010 @ 8:29 pm
Oh Marty, I love this story. My Dear friend Mary Ellen would have adored you. Years ago she had a mouse in her house and asked me to catch it and let it go out in the woods. I trapped him with peanut butter as bait- he was covered in it when I opened the trap. He couldn’t have jumped away if he wanted to- he was stuck to the trap by all the pnut butter. I let him (her?) go in my wood pile and left sunflower seeds in it all winter for him/her.
Comment by Auntie Kate — January 15, 2010 @ 9:44 pm
I put on kitchen gloves to catch any mice the cats bring in. Just pick them up by the tail and take them back outside. They’re almost always deer mice. Srsly cute. We also get voles, lizards and the occasional shrew. They’re the fastest.
Then there was the evening when suddenly the cats started to make some odd noises in the kitchen/dining area. We went to look and there, perched up on the back of one of the dining table chairs, was a young black rat, looking concerned. I happen to like rats, but in any case, I got a large jar, walked over and slowly held it up toward the rat who practically jumped into it. Back outside he/she went.
The bat got itself into the house and managed to get itself back out, which was good.
I had to wait until the hummingbird was too tired to fly before I could catch it in a fish net and turn it loose.
We don’t kill spiders, but let them get on with their job.
Mosquitoes only get wacked if they land on us.
I guess the point that I would like to make is that we share this planet with lots of other creatures who have as much right to be here as we do.
Maybe they shouldn’t be in our houses, but it shouldn’t be a capital offense. I would see no need to clear out the landscaping around my house just to keep some critters away. But then we get a kick, from a safe distance, out of the visiting skunks, too.
Three cheers for Dr. Becker for choosing not to kill, even at the risk of some inconvenience and cold toes.
Comment by Susan Fox — January 15, 2010 @ 10:36 pm
I was reading somewhere, probably the PETA website, about mouse tape (if that’s what it’s called). Where you put down this sticky tape and they get their feet stuck on it and slowly die. I’ve never had to catch a mouse here so I never thought about it, really, but that article disturbed me.
So soon after I am at the hardware store to buy fly traps. I will open the window to let insects free and I will take them outside if I catch them. But a house full of rabbits attracts flies and there is something very nasty and vile called flystrike (one more good reason to keep rabbits INSIDE the house) that I do NOT want my bunnies to suffer.
So I wanted to get the 3-4 flies out of the basement. I was ready to buy that sticky fly tape when it occurred to me that it’s just as cruel as the mouse tape.
So I bought one of those bag traps. You fill it half-way with water, which activates the fly pheromones inside, and hang it somewhere. There is an opening at the top where flies enter, lured by the smelly water, and they fall into the water and drown. Still not a gentle death, but much faster than starving to death being stuck to tape for days and days.
One big problem with this method is the bag smells horrific.
Comment by Mary Mary — January 16, 2010 @ 7:31 am
Talking about wild animals, I just had an encounter with a fox, sort of.
Mr. Fox was on one side of the fence and I on the other, staring at eachother.
Boy, I was so glad my cat was behind another fence, an animal-proof fence.
We all just stared at eachother, but I loved seeing such a beautiful creature that almost looked like one of the dogs I had when I was growing up!
As to a mouse, I had one in my storage closet that I didn’t know about until I found strange pellets and torn clothing. Then I investigated the source, found the mouse, and put him outside, unharmed but dazzled. He did not like being ejected from HIS home so suddenly and without prior warning.
I felt bad for Mr. Mouse, but he wasn’t a guest I would welcome. Probably lived on cat food I had left at night for my cats.
Comment by Evelyn — January 17, 2010 @ 8:29 am