When I was a kid we caught mice in those standard Victor mouse traps. They were fun to play with too: GI Joe would spill all his classified mission directives when tortured with them and Johnny West turned into a stooly pigeon too! All the Action Figures did! (And of course it was all fun n' games until you got your own finger snapped in the damn things).
Back in the good ol' days an action figure worth his salt
could take torture sessions with these all day long.
I suspect the cheap toys today would be gone with one snap.
Time moved on and I grew up (or at least my body did) but I still found myself fascinated by these things. When we moved to the farm Pop went high tech when he bought one that would snap up to 8 mice in a night. It was a flat cylindrical affair where the rodent put his head in to get at the bait and then got snapped. When we got up to do our chores in the morning we would both pause to cackle like morons at the poor vermin we killed with these idiotic things, HAR HAR HAR!
Mom never really adapted to the farm and one day got so disgusted with our antics, that she threw all the conventional mouse traps away and bought these more humane 'live capture' rigs designed not to kill the little bastards - just trap them so that bed wetting pissers and moaners wouldn't have to shed any tears over dead mice in the barn. Pop and I were disgusted, but we set the damned things out anyways because after all - the goal was to get the mice out of the shop and the barn - and not to entertain ourselves by killing them as inhumanely as possible.
The next morning I checked the trap and Pop and I laughed like morons again! The trapped mice were killing each other and eating each other alive! HAR HAR HAR! HAR HAR HAR! Mom nearly passed out when we showed her.
Gotta give credit where credit is due: if mice had to die, and a progressive 'sunshine, lollipops' solution wasn't possible... a viable, but warm and fuzzy traditional solution was!
Corky was about the same colour as this bandit, but she had long hair and was as dumb as a post. She was my first cat (Pop hates cats) and I just loved her. One day we saw her in action: she had cornered a mouse on the patio and was slowly torturing it to death. When she finally killed it, she looked around, then picked it up and carried it over to the door into the house and left it there for Mom to find. Pop and I, of course, had to cackle and the HAR-HAR-HARring brought Mom out - and she lost her mud when she saw the present the cat left. A couple months later I adopted another stray female cat that Pop named Sammy - she was black as sin and she started leaving Mom "presents" too.
Mom was still a bit of a nice lady back then. We finished her off for good when one day the cats cornered a gopher in the flower garden. They could contain it but they were leery of the rodent's size and teeth - so me and the dog moved in to help - and the gopher bolted. Somehow the critter got past the cats - and the chase was on! We set up a cordon - and funnelled the critter right back toward Charlie the Dawg - and it ran right into her mouth and she put an end to him with one big CRUNCH.
"HAR HAR HAR!" Pop chortled. "Good work everyone! That was some mighty fine team work!" Then Mom came round the corner of the house and noticed her son, her dog and two cats had trampled half her flower garden. "My garden...." she said in a small, sad voice. The last straw was when Charlie dropped the dead gopher at her feet as a consolation. Something just seemed to snap in Mom that day - she's been a horrible, ghastly old bitch ever since, and Pop and I stoically weather her bitchery in brave and forlorn silence. I know my soul is as pure as the driven snow - but I can't help but feel somehow partially responsible for what happened that day. (What is that horrible stink coming over my blog?)
In any event, the matters of mice and men have resurfaced - this time on youtube. The game's changed since the days when Pop and I played it - but the sentiments and the character of the players has not.
Happy Hump Day everyone.
I have run across some very tough farm cats back in the day. I do not mind cats, I prefer dogs.
ReplyDeleteBe nice to your mom.
My daughters first cat was a feral kitten I caught out in the haystack, BW. I lost 3 gallons of blood but within a week he was a cuddler.
DeleteMy Mom IS a good, if perplexing woman. She can drive me up the goddamned wall with her bullshit one minute - and in the next she'll blow me away with her insight and grasp of things. Casting her as a villain in my foolish narrative just tickled my sense of humour, such as it is.
I had a mouse problem in the chicken coop. I planted several Victor traps, as well as something called a "Tin Cat;" a live-catch trap with instructions that said (paraphrased) "Take the trap at least two miles from your location and release the mice." Yeah; like fish! I'm going to throw that stupid thing in the car, drive it two miles (or do the same on a bike, if you're a welfare bum or a tree hugger), and release the mice (so they can become someone else's problem)." Uh-huh... How about I fill a five-gallon bucket about halfway with water, and dump the contents of the trap into it? I'm happy. The neighbors two miles away are happy. Of course, it was probably the neighbor who dumped his damned cat in our yard; the one that chased off our barn cat/mouse-eating machine. I sent the German Shepherd out on a mission one night. The dump cat is gone. The barn cat is back. All is right in the world... unless you're a mouse in the chicken coop...
ReplyDeleteBy the way; the Tin Cat does do a good job of evicting mice...
Oh; and the mice in the coop must have been an issue for the hens. I was emptying out the Tin Cat one day, and one of the little bastard mice got away. It ran into the coop. Oh well; tomorrow's another day, I figured. A couple of minutes later, while I was baiting the Tin Cat with peanut butter, I saw one of the hens in the coop was acting strange; like it was having a seizure. I opened the door to the coop. That damned hen had caught the mouse that got away. Its "seizure" was its attempt to get the other hens off her tail. Once she'd done that, she pummeled the mouse into the ground with her beak. After killing it, she ate it. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it! Who would have known?...
Chickens'll eat bugs, mice and frogs and consider them a treat! As a juvenile delinquent I threw a gopher I'd shot with a .22 in the pen - and they picked and pecked at that too!
DeleteChicken Mom over at Coopville is feeding hers spaghetti and Cheerios and they absolutely love it. I've heard that eating meat will spoil the taste of the eggs but don't know if I believe that or not.
Feeding them meat doesn't spoil the flavor of the girl's eggs at all. It only makes them poop more. They love meat loaf, chicken and pork chops, by the way.... :o)
DeleteI used to work for Bell Labs, makers of the Tomcat rodent control products. Bell was trying to come up with a viable spin trap which would capture the mouse alive and unharmed. The thing was 6 - 8 inches in diameter and didn't work well (made in China, but that's another story).
ReplyDeleteWatching the trap in action gave me an idea, which I have not as yet put into practice. I was going to manufacture a pre-paid mailing label, so when you see the trap has sprung, just slap a label on that bad boy and drop it in the nearest post box. Mail it to:
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals
501 Front St., Norfolk, VA 23510
I have been letting mine out over at Uncle Bob's Treehouse... but I guess I better do this right! Can you get better postage rates if you flatten them, Jack?
DeleteGee... and all this time I thought PETA stood for "People Eating Tasty Animals!" No wonder they won't let me into the zoo anymore! I wonder what they're doing with all those now-unemployed critters from Ringling Bros...
Delete