Drain you of your sanity
Face the Thing That Should Not Be
~ Metallica
One cat was yawning; the other was grooming. Between them on the porch stood a baffled exterminator. "You have two cats?" he said. "And you have a problem with MICE?!"
Alas, no. I have no problem with mice, except that they nest in the tractor over the winter. Otherwise the cats are very good with mice. And moles, voles, baby birds, bunnies; Zissou even brought me a baby squirrel one day. But as I explained to the nice exterminator, there was a Thing in my basement that the cats couldn't handle. I heard it one day. The cats galloped down the stairs. I heard chittering and wondered, is it a bird? But no, that was SQUEAKING.
Cats came up all nonchalant and empty-pawed. I had nightmares. I rented Ratatouille. It didn't help.
***
So I investigated poisons and traps and such. Dale always used D Con, but someone told me that would be bad for the cats. (Although none of our cats have ever been adversely affected.) The farmers swear by "Just One Bite," but again, it's poison, and what about the cats?
Believe it or not, I found a website that was actually helpful (!) - a message board forum all about this topic. It turns out that it takes so little D Con to kill a mouse that a cat would have to eat 20 of them even to get a tummy-ache. D Con isn't going to hurt the cats, even if they were inclined to play with dead rodents, which they're not.
But there was a lot of other information about how the poisons work (one of them dehydrates, so you'll find your mice aiming for any water sources) and what makes them poisons. An amazingly reasonable individual explained that lots of things can be poisonous to various species, and the word "poison" doesn't necessarily mean it's an evil thing for humans and pets. Look at the skull and crossbones on your cleaning supplies. These too are poisons ...
Still, among all the good advice this guy shared, my favorite was this: "I'm a professional exterminator." My Aha moment: I could PAY somebody to come take care of this. So I did.
***
After explaining to the nice exterminator about the critter the cats haven't caught, and showing him the dirt that has been kicked into the basement by a tunneling animal, I warned him, "We're giong to call it a ground squirrel, okay?" A couple of times he almost said "ra ..." but I reminded him this was a ground squirrel we were after. He set traps indoors and out, explaining to me that the cats wouldn't be able to get into them, and that they were baited with poison.
"Okay," I said.
Four weeks later he came back to check, but had caught nothing indoors. Some time after that, I heard the chittering in the basmeent again. <sigh>
***
Yesterday Gordon came and patched the hole where the critter had tunneled and gnawed its way from outdoors straight into my basement. He put up a 2 x 4 and cleaned up all the insulation and soil, and warned me that it's temporary - we'll need to repair that board more permanently next summer. But at least the entryway is blocked for the winter.
And guess what I found on the basement floor when I went to admire his handiwork?
That's right. It's a dead GROUND SQUIRREL! Woo hoooo!
Gordon denies killing it. Maybe Myfanwy finally had her moment of glory!
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