On Slowly Poisoning a Mouse
I’m slowly poisoning a mouse that is sneaking into my apartment from behind the stove. I haven’t seen it, but I assume it’s a little gray mouse like the other ones that I have extinguished before. There are two empty lots near my row house and I have been told that they are filled with mice and other little critters. When the weather gets cold, sometimes they try their luck indoors. Unfortunately for them, when they come into my apartment they usually leave in a Ziploc bag.
I had previously been using glue traps, what with vengeance being swift as Taylor; full of might and fury and all that; but once the mouse is stuck to the glue, there really isn’t anything you can do to save the life of the mouse. Is it more humane to put it out of its misery at that point, or is it more moral to cast it aside and let nature do the dirty deed for you?
That’s when I moved on to the blocks of mouse poison. I had these little blocks of mouse poison that were inside a maze-like dispenser and some little mouse fellow had eaten about half of the block of poison and it got me thinking. Every day I would come home, I would see a little bit more of the poison block disappeared. Sometimes I would hear something gnawing during the night and I knew that some mouse thought it was being really clever at getting what he wanted and feasting on this little green square of poison.
At first I was gleeful that the more the mouse consumed, the quicker my problem was over. After a couple of days went by, I started to feel bad because this mouse thought it was getting what he or she wanted: food. The truth was that by it getting what it thought it wanted, it was moving quicker towards its own destruction. I can imagine this mouse seeing this little green cube sitting between the burners on my stove and feasting on it, being so happy that it was able to steal away a little bit of food from the occupant of this building, not knowing the toxic things it was taking in.
It made me think about the larger issue of people not knowing what is really good for them. I began to think about times when people I come into contact with are being more aggressively focused on their own needs above all others. I think about those people who are so aggressive at getting what they want or achieving some need or goal that they don’t necessarily care whether it makes other people uncomfortable or the poorer for it. They feel like other people’s emotions are their own problems. I imagine there are many times where I’ve been focused on some personal goal or habit and been oblivious to stepping on other people’s toes.
This incident with the mouse and the poison made me realize that by other people just going along with what I want (when I am being aggressive or bullying) they are ultimately making me a more toxic person because they are creating a precedent that my ask is not unreasonable.
I then thought about people in my own life that are easier just to agree with than to debate with. In this example, that domineering friend ends up being like the mouse who thinks they are getting something of value but is actually getting something toxic. Whenever I let that domineering friend win, I am making them a little bit more of a toxic person without them realizing it.
I then looked back at events online, on Facebook, in my job, and in real life and saw instances of people making selfish choices becoming more toxic as more people go along with them and their way of thinking just to avoid argument.
This is when I thought back to the non-metaphorical mouse. I wasn’t sure if they were eating all of the poison or just distributing it to their family and children but I suddenly felt bad. I don’t think a mouse is clever enough to realize that the food they had been eating is actually what is killing them because people consume things all the time food-wise that are slowly killing them and people haven’t been able to figure it out so I can’t imagine a mouse is any more clever. This was when I got the have a heart trap that catches the mouse but doesn’t kill it. I then can go to an empty lot several blocks from my house and get rid of it. I’ve been baiting it with a little bit of peanut butter smeared on the far wall so that as soon as the mouse stepped in to get the peanut butter or investigate, the trap would close shut and I could go and release the mouse outside. I decided to make the switch despite being incredulous at its effectiveness because of the poison I had been using.
I’m sure that the mouse will consider being caught in the act to be a defeat and will never really know that I have spared the mouse increased intoxication, but I feel better about my decision and the mouse is still alive to go and bother someone else… but that isn’t my problem anymore, and that’s the good news.
