What’s with the rodents this summer?  The population of mice , squirrels and chipmunks this  season has positively exploded.  We live in the country and, naturally, expect them to be streaking about in and around the barns and leaping from beam to beam on the porches but this summer they have been  omnipresent, audacious and in such numbers that they inhabit ( and worse of all will co-habit) beyond acceptance.  The little buggers are everywhere.

Two days ago a shorts-wearing friend, having a well-deserved glass of wine in my living room was heard to let out a muffled roar of surprise as a baby mouse that had taken up residence in my house, leaped onto one of his socks and started  to climb higher !  I’m  not kidding you…heading up his leg towards the baggy leg- holes it was indeed.

This was obviously a baby mouse, innocent of the  strange territory into which it was headed but, mouse-let or no it has got to go.  Tomorrow, first thing,  I shall be seen at the check-out counter of  “Aubuchon’s Hardware” or” Poulin’s Lumber” stocking up on Havahart traps and those  Electronic Zapper things.

Tales of fires started by mice and squirrels chewing on electrical wires have given a sense of urgent determination to this animal lover and PETA supporter and, although I don’t want to cause a creature pain, it’s war that I’m declaring.

I’ll take the humane road and not the solution told to me by a neighbor, an old farmers wife who, plagued with squirrels in her attic, set out a Havahart trap day after day and baited it with peanuts.    “It did the job”  she said,  “I got rid of the lot of them..seventeen of them nibblin’ bastards..caught ’em in the Havahart and then…threw the trap in the pond .  Seventeen times”

What a sweetheart………..