If you’re tuning in this week to find out if I caught the mice in my garage, you’re going to be very disappointed. Not as disappointed as me, and not as disappointed as my wife when she finds out I’m telling the world we have mice.
We don’t have mice. Our chickens have mice. We have chickens.
If you haven’t read last week’s column or for some reason didn’t commit it to your permanent memory, last week I talked about how I always make owning chickens sound fun and easy, but it turns out there are dark sides to owning chickens that no one talks about.
One dark side we didn’t talk about is that it draws cats to your backyard.
Yes, I already had cats in my backyard, because garbage cans also draw cats to your backyard. Another thing that draws cats to your backyard is leaving the door to your detached garage open a few inches. One of my kids did that a few years ago, and boy did we have kittens. Literal kittens, born in our garage. They were so cute. One of my son’s friends helped us get them out, all the while with his mother saying, “I wish we had cats!” and his father saying, “Not in our house!” And then the mother cat disappeared, and we kept feeding the kittens with a medicine dropper and hoping she’d come back for her babies, because we didn’t really want them, so we left them out in our backyard every night and they disappeared one at a time over the course of the summer.
But now it’s years later, and this neighbor actually has a cat. And that cat has been hanging out in our backyard, staring at our chickens. It does not help that our chickens do not know how to be quiet. Literally everything they do alerts potential predators to their location.
Actually, they have two cats. They have an indoor cat and an outdoor cat. Or so I hear. I’ve never seen the indoor cat. But apparently the father allows that now.
The outdoor cat’s name is Oreo, because it is for some reason okay to name pets after the color of their skin. Oreo wanders around the neighborhood getting into people’s garbage cans and seeing if they threw out any chicken.
And then one day he was like, “Hey! Live chickens!”
And ever since then, he’s been watching the chickens, on and off, which we at first thought meant he wanted to eat them, so we kept chasing him away. But now most of the chickens are his size. Especially the rooster.
Or maybe he’s not actually stalking them. And I say that because he randomly just shows up in our backyard and stares at stuff. Sometimes we come outside and he’s staring at the back fence. Sometimes he’s staring at the door of our garage. I don’t know.
But the dark side of owning chickens that I did talk about last week is mice. We currently have mice living in our garage. So even though from time to time I complain, right now I thank the Ribbono Shel Olam that our garage is detached.
Basically, a detached garage is like a separate structure on your property that you usually don’t even think about unless it’s the summer. But recently, we’ve been using it in the winter, as we’ve been keeping multiple 50-lb. bags of chicken food in our garage because that’s how much you have to order to get it for a good price, assuming your chickens live long enough to eat 100 pounds of food.
And something’s been biting open the bottoms of the bags. And we’re pretty sure it’s something that can read, because otherwise how do they know it’s food? The bags are sealed.
I don’t want to feed mice. I want to feed the animals that I want to feed and that’s it. So the first thing we did was order mousetraps. But what kind? There are a lot of types of mousetraps out there, and there’s no way all of them work. So I figured that you go by whatever the professionals use.
A number of years ago, we had mice in our actual house, and if you think that cleaning your house properly prevents mice from being attracted to your home, I don’t think that a creature that can chew through a sack that’s designed to hold 50 pounds of food is going to be deterred by you sweeping your floors and dumping it into a garbage bag. All the mice care about is whether your house is warmer than it is outside, so if you really don’t want to attract mice, you have to make sure it’s not.
So we hired an exterminator whose primary method of operation was to leave mousetraps around our house and never see us again.
I’m not sure what we expected him to do. He can’t fit between our walls.
The main trap he seemed to use was a glue trap. A glue trap is a big piece of cardboard with glue on top that the mouse steps on and it gets stuck, assuming it steps on the trap before every piece of dust in your house settles on it. And then you pick up the trap from the other end, wearing gardening gloves, and you yell, “Open the door! Open the door!” and everyone shrieks, and you leave it outside because you don’t know where else to put it, and then you look out the window an hour later to see a cat frustratedly trying to remove an empty glue trap from its paw. At least that’s how we did it.
He’d also brought some kind of poisonous blocks in a plastic package, which we put in a safe place so our kids wouldn’t get to it, and then a few years later we had mice again and we were like, “Where did we put the poisonous blocks?”
“I don’t know; it must have been a really safe place!”
And then one day during Pesach cleaning we found a dead mouse in a corner, and then a few days later—also during Pesach cleaning—we found the bag of poison blocks, and there was a hole chewed in the bottom of the bag. So some problems take care of themselves.
But to be honest, I’d rather know if I’m making progress in the garage. If I use poison, how am I going to know when we’re done? So I went with the glue traps. I bought a package of 3 dozen because it came out to a good price, though it’s only worth it if we get a lot of mice going forward. One can only hope.
Though now, come to think of it, even if the glue traps work, I still won’t know when we’re done. I have no idea how many mice there are. Though I hope not more than 36.
There’s been no progress. I think the mice know about these traps. And I say this because after a few days of catching nothing, I put one a trap in the middle of the garage and put a pile of chicken food on the center and then sprinkled some more around it. And when I came back the next day, only the food around it was eaten.
Then my wife came up with the idea of using the cat. It’s hanging around our backyard anyway.
Maybe that’s why he’s been staring at the garage.
If that’s the case, one can only wonder what’s living under the fence.
So one day we opened the garage door a few inches, and he ducked right in. He was pretty excited. He also seemed pretty confident that whatever is in there is smaller than he is. He walked in and did not then immediately charge right out.
So now every morning we meet him outside our garage and we open the door and he clocks in. I have no idea if he’s accomplishing anything in there. Or how long it’s supposed to take. So I kind of have to leave the garage door open all day. Even though to be honest, keeping the garage door open all day is how we got issues the first time. I hope he doesn’t have babies.
I also don’t know how we’re supposed to know when he’s done. It’s not like I spend all day watching him through the window. Let him do his thing. I don’t stand over anyone I hire—plumber, electrician… What’s he gonna steal? A bike? The sukkah? It’s not like an exterminator where he comes back to you and says, “Alright, I did it,” and gives you a bill. We have no idea. I still put out mousetraps that I check on a regular basis, and I haven’t caught any mice. Does that mean he’s been successful? Or are both the cat and the mousetraps unsuccessful?
Well, not unsuccessful per se. Just the other day I saw the cat come limping out of the garage with a mousetrap stuck to its foot, and I had to come out and help get it off. So the only one I’ve successfully caught in a glue trap so far has been the cat.
At least we know it works.
Either way, I feel like animals goreres animals. I got chickens, and now I have mice and a part-time cat. I don’t want to have to send a dog in if we lose the cat.
Come to think of it, I actually haven’t seen the cat in a couple of days. I hope it’s not in there.
But it could be because his host family is making a chasunah this week, so maybe he’s helping.
Though you’d think they would use their indoor cat for that.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.