Today, I Killed a Mouse (warning: contains some cruelty to animals)

It was nearing death anyway, I was certain of that. Judging from my past experience, I can tell you that a healthy mouse will scurry away from you and not let you pick it up and stroke its fur, tickle its tummy, or feed it peanuts. They just run away, usually around baseboards and under things, like big furry cockroaches. I've tried to catch a live mouse sprinting away, and it's almost an impossibility, almost.

The mouse was loitering right near my bicycle in the basement. He did not look healthy and just waited there for me to come up to it. Sure, his legs were moving, but he was going nowhere. He had no joie de vivre. I immediately started to look for some implement so that I could put it out of it's misery.

I was reminded that a mouse once came up to me in the kitchen, looked right at me, and seemed to be begging me to send him on to the next world. I used a frying pan. Years ago, in my small room in a shared house on Bathurst Street, I trapped a mouse, but the poor rodent got pinned by the legs, and so his neck did not snap. I grabbed my adjustable wrench and clipped him on the head.

Just so you think I am not some sort of psychopath who enjoys killing animals, I felt so bad about killing the poor mouse, that I removed all of the traps from my room and just let the mice be free to eat my food and crap on my floors.

A few years ago, I had to resort to traps in a house that had way too many mice. One day, a poor little mouse ended up backwards in a trap. Oh, and by the way, I tried those so-called humane traps and they do not work. The cheese mysteriously disappeared, but there was no mouse in the trap. Anyway, unless you release them in the wilds of Ontario, they are just going to find their way back into your house or the house next to the park where you released them.

So, I had a crippled mouse and needed to send it to the mouse afterlife. I decided that hitting it over the head was a bit too brutal, so I decided to drown it. Apparently, drowning is a pleasant way to die. I am not sure if this holds true for a mouse, but it has got to be better that dying in the jaws of a cat. I used a pair of pliers and held the trap with the dangling mouse under the running water, until I realized that I was simply giving the mouse a cold shower.

I put the plug in the sink, and dropped the trap in the accumulating water. I had no idea that mice could swim. Well, this one sort of could, even with a heavy trap attached. He might have died, eventually, after treading water for hours and hours, but that seemed too cruel. I pushed down on the trap with my pliers, forcing the mouse underwater, until I saw a few bubbles escape his mouth. Yes, I felt mean.

A few days later, I did almost the impossible. I saw a mouse on the basement floor. I grabbed a broom and managed to throw him off balance. I whacked again, but the little bastard kept on going. I had him cornered but there was a large wardrobe just ahead, a place of refuge for the beast. I struck again, and the mouse got tangled in the bristles of the broom. When I raised my broom, the mouse tumbled end over end - much like the bone in 2001 A Space Odyssey - until it landed several feet away. I pounced like a cat and made sure his days of pestilence had ended.

You know, mice are very destructive. They will chew through anything, eat your food, leave droppings all over the place, make noise. They are pests and you don't want any mice in your house. Trust me.

Today, I killed a mouse by dropping my toolbox on it.

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