Stop writing about mice so much, said someone. Well, they are only news when they come swarming into the house after the harvest. Put down your traps at the beginning of August is the usual advice. But it is possible to rid yourself - temporarily - of the creatures (didn't the Romans eat them candified?) humanely, according to a correspondent in The Countryman, the English publication. "The colony in our cellar is controlled by the use of humane traps", writes a reader from Macclesfield, Cheshire.
"My first routine with the humane traps was to carry them down the garden to a log-pile, covered with plastic, some 150 yards away. It become obvious that when the trap was opened outside this log-pile, the behaviour of the escapee varied considerably. Some would leap out at once into their new den, others were very cagey about leaving at all, finally jumping out, some to the right some to the left. A pattern emerged that convinced me that the mice were taking about 24 to 36 hours to return to the cellar (through trees up a one in 4 gradient).
"At this time we decided to modernise our kitchen and the person doing the work told us that he, too, had mice to remove from his house. He marked his mice with white paint after being convinced that they were returning, and took them one and a half miles away, across a main road and a railway". They still returned. So, says the original letter writer, "I acquired a cage in which to keep our victims until there were two or three. I took them two miles away, carrying them across a river in order to avoid any danger of them going across the road. (This man is a Saint Francis of the four-feet). I was never quite sure whether they managed to return some days later (over a hill, 1,750 feet high). This routine, however, came to an end when we acquired a feral cat with her kittens and I had a cat-flap put in the cellar door.
Well he did his best for a long time. But it wasn't all like that. The writer did acknowledge that in his attic, where the wiring for the house is, he had used poison. "But I should like an alternative method to safeguard our wiring." His heart is in the right place. Imagine - he admits that he has mice all year round. But then you have the cats bringing the dead mice and shrews as trophies to you. One woman regularly has these sacrificial objects laid beside her bed almost daily - the cat having made its way to her up the ivy and other climbers. Y