Mice

I loved being a member of Her Majesty's Coastguard, which I was for some thirteen years while we lived on Ardnamurchan, not least because I learned so much. Amongst other things, I leaned that a mouse can render a huge Toyota HiLux useless, simply by chewing through the right electrical cable under the bonnet. From this I leaned to keep an ear open for scuttlings in our house roof, because there's lots up there that mice like to chew - the lagging on the pipes and the electric wires in particular, a good chew through one of the latter being a potential cause of fire.

So, having tried several other, perhaps more humane traps in the years we had the general store on Ardnamurchan, I now deploy one of these if I have a suspicion that we have small visitors which, the other day, we had, since the warning raisin I keep in the roof suddenly disappeared. So two of these Little Nippers were deployed. Normally I catch the mouse immediately but this one had obviously come across this sort of trap before, because twice he managed to remove the raisin without springing the trap. 

Happily, for the electrics in the roof if not the mouse, I caught him this morning. In 95% of cases, the mouse's death is instantaneous but this doesn't always happen. A week or so ago I caught a mouse by his left hind leg; disposing of him was not pleasant.

My experience is that mice often come into the house in pairs, so the traps will remain armed for the next couple of days, though I would far prefer it if the mice would kindly NOT visit our house.