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Discover Smith Mountain Lake
SUMMER 2016
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If you have a June graduate, you can still challenge them to
“go out there and build a better mouse trap”. Certainly, there’s
nothing appealing about the ones available today. Take those
wooden snap trapsVictor makes - unless you don’t mind seeing
little mutilated bodies under your kitchen sink or in the back of
your closet, you’ll want to avoid them. Plus, once they’ve been
baited and spring-loaded, they have such a hair trigger that they
usually go off in your hand before you can set them down. Even
if they don’t get your fingers, they scare you silly.
Instead of a wooden trap, my son opted for one of those sticky
pads to get rid of his mouse problem. It would be cleaner,
he reasoned, and even a little more humane. He caught the
mouse without any muss or fuss.There was no blood or gore.
The problem is the very-much-alive little rodent was squealing
in terror while struggling to free its feet from the pad when
We Still Need
A Better
MOUSE
TRAP
By Kate Hofstetter
my son found it. Some creatures, we have since learned, will
actually chew off a foot to get free from such traps. My son
made eye contact with the helpless, terrified little mouse,
which is always a mistake, as it leads to self-loathing. The
manufacturer says to dispose of the entire trap, along with
the (living or dead) mouse.They don’t, however, tell you how
to steel yourself to do this, or how long the squealing mouse
will live inside a garbage can.
Instead, my son spent a large chunk of his day learning how to
free a mouse from a sticky trap. It even involved a phone call
to the manufacturer.The spray type cooking oil, he learned,
does the trick. This was information my husband could have
used only a few months earlier.
We didn’t have mice but we had a problem with baby snakes –
obviously a nest of snake eggs that were hatched in the crawl
space under our house.The babies weren’t much larger than
a good sized night crawler, but they were clearly snakes, and
we certainly didn’t want them cavorting around in our house.
For that matter, we didn’t want night crawlers either.A friend
had recommended sticky traps.
My husband, Pete, put out three or four such traps: One in the
garage where it looked like baby snakes might be coming in,
a couple in the hall before they could get into our bedroom,
and one in the basement for good measure. Over the years,
I’ve learned an important fact about traps and my husband:
once he’s set them, if they haven’t caught anything within the
first few days, he starts to lose interest. Next, he forgets he
has set traps at all. In total, this takes about 10 days.
At least I think that’s how he ended up getting caught in
his own trap. I was out shopping. He forgot about the trap
