Diary

Letters

Vol. 28 No. 2 · 26 January 2006

From Julian Rathbone

Alan Bennett’s account of his experiences with mice prompts me to share with your readers a brief but true anecdote (LRB, 5 January). A couple of years ago we found ourselves providing living space and food to a colony of house mice. We bought a ‘humane’ trap and successfully removed four or five. The sixth mouse chewed a corner off the heavy-duty plastic box, ate the bait and left. Homebase duly refunded our money. We borrowed a metal trap from a friend. The next morning the trap was sprung, but empty, the bait gone. This happened three times, enough to persuade us that we had a supermouse. And so at last we deployed a Little Nipper, which performed as it should. Various morals are pointed. Had the supermouse possessed merely normal intelligence and agility it could have survived and bred. In the event it became an evolutionary dead end. Less philosophically, the moral of the story is: no one likes a smart arse.

Julian Rathbone
Thorney Hill, Dorset

Vol. 28 No. 3 · 9 February 2006

From Adrian Glossop

Alan Bennett proposes a principled approach to the eradication of mice whereby they are offered a choice of humane rendition or kindly being put to sleep by poison (LRB, 5 January). Julian Rathbone (Letters, 26 January) describes his persistence with humane rendition but ultimately used targeted execution to despatch a resurgent mouse, thereby possibly changing the course of mouse evolution. There is a third way, free of anthropocentric concerns.

My humane traps failed in the same way as Julian Rathbone’s and I then resorted to poison. The problem with poison is that although you know the pile has been nibbled it is rare to find any carcasses; some may fester unhygienically, others may be eaten by third parties which in turn are poisoned. In my case one fell asleep in the base of a washing-machine downpipe, causing a flood. Hence I deployed a battery of Little Nippers. The main advantage of the Nipper is you know you have caught your mouse, and any doubts about the humaneness of the despatch can be offset by the thought that it is analogous to the experience of efficient execution by guillotine or axe – a moment of excruciating pain followed by nothingness. Moreover, I baited my Nippers with the tastiest cheddar cheese from the Co-op’s delicatessen counter.

Nevertheless I remained troubled by the ethics of my strategy and decided to purchase and install a barn owl box. It is natural for a barn owl to catch eight or more mice a day – the ultimate weapon of mouse destruction.

Adrian Glossop
London W12

Vol. 28 No. 4 · 23 February 2006

From Charles Kenwright

Unlike Alan Bennett (LRB, 5 January), and the other warm-hearted writers-in who have been sharing with LRB readers their experiences of trying to eliminate mice from their living space in the most considerate way possible, I am bound to admit that nice questions of methodology and appeals to my underlying sense of oneness with nature have never been allowed to interfere when I have been asked to do my bit in the global war on rodents. Perhaps this is because I learned in a hard school, not with mice, which always turn out to look embarrassingly small once you’ve trapped them, but with rats, which always turn out to be alarmingly big. No doubt as one mark of the disapproval felt higher up the military pecking order for my offensively civilian outlook, I was at one point in my National Service put in charge of rodent control in the camp where I was stationed, where rats were very keen on, among other undercover incursions, gnawing their way through the bottom of soldiers’ kitbags in search of the bars of chocolate that had been stuffed into them. That was bad for morale and we rodent control freaks set to with a will, stirring doses of warfarin into slops collected from the cookhouse and laying them out along what we thought might be the favourite rat-runs. Occasionally it worked and occasionally there were dead rats to be removed. So ugly were they in their rigidity I found it all too easy afterwards to extend my revulsion to the whole rodent order.

Charles Kenwright
Honiton, Devon

From Simon Port

I tried mousetraps, superglue, poison, and chasing the mice with a sieve. Nothing worked. We could hear the mice munching through the food in the larder as we sat down for tea. Then a friend recommended a device that emits an ultrasonic whine in the room where it’s situated, and sends an electromagnetic pulse through all the electric wiring in your house. The pulse doesn’t harm the mice at all; they just hate the sound and the endless vibrations. Our mice gave up and left two days after I plugged the device in.

Simon Port
London SW12