Autumn is upon us, with its dying sunlight, its wafts of sweet-hot bonfire
smoke on the frost-chilled air and, for many, some unwanted house guests
with bad table manners and a somewhat laissez faire, not to say incontinent,
attitude to toilet training.
It starts with a few seemingly random events, like the slow-burn opening of a
horror film: odd, ragged little holes in food containers; wires that seem to
have been eaten through; tiny piles of little black things. Then you're
watching television one night and you spot, out of the corner of one eye,
some halfnoticed half-movement, so fleeting that you're not sure if it's
real. But it is real, and eventually it will pluck up courage to stroll out
into the middle of the carpet, as if it wants to sit and watch Strictly
Come Dancing with you. A mouse.
Now there is still a stigma attached to being “infested” (even the word makes
you want to shower in hot bleach) with mice, but with complaints to councils
topping 367,000 between 2006 and 2007, it's a myth (one of many) that
rodents are interested only in dirty homes. On the contrary, it is a
middle-class secret that dares not speak its name. Try raising the subject
at a dinner party - no sooner have the scrunched-up faces relaxed than the
stories will flow. I have been inundated with tales of tails, from the
inadvertent toasting of a mouse that stayed too long in the crumb tray to
hushed tales of a “supermouse” breed known only to residents of the London
boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Hackney.
For some, the experience is pure torment. David McKendrick, who made the
mistake of pulling out the wire wool that he found in crevices of his new
flat in the Barbican, Central London, remembers being so driven to
distraction by late-night scratching under his bedroom floorboards that he
was soon tearing them up with a hammer and chisel. “But they were really
hard mice,” he says. “I've had a mouse jump off the boiler and hit me in the
chest. I've come home at night, opened the door, and there's one sitting
there, looking at me.”
Others take a more pragmatic approach. Vanessa Morris, an artist who lives in
the village of Cattistock, Dorset, remembers being woken by the sound of a
ball being thrown around her son's attic bedroom. “It turned out that a
mouse had taken a hard plastic snooker ball off the table, rolled it around
the room for a bit, then eaten half of it,” she says. “We've had mice
trapped under our floorboards ever since. If they come up we catch them, but
it would cost hundreds to get our carpets and floorboards lifted, so we've
just learnt to live with them.”
Savvas Othon knows more than most about vermin. He joined Rentokil 14 years
ago as a humble “foot technician”, working his way up and down Tottenham
Court Road, in Central London, without even the benefit of a van, and is now
the company's technical director. He confirms the impression that Britain's
rodents are on the march, with call-outs up 36 per cent in the past year,
and points out that admitting to your little four-legged problem may be a
large step towards solving it: “The chances are, if you've got them, your
neighbour's got them, so by working together you can get on top of the
infestation. The source of the problem - a pile of rubbish somewhere, a hole
in someone's wall - could be three or four doors either side.”
Mouse holes can be as tiny as 6mm in diameter - the same as that of a
ballpoint pen - and a rat is capable of squeezing itself through a 10mm gap.
“When I'm out on a job,” says Othon, “I try to think like a rodent. How would
I get inside your house without being seen? You're talking about
tumble-dryer vents that haven't been capped off properly, and little holes
around water pipes. The big thing is to keep your immediate area clear of
food debris and potential nesting sites such as compost heaps, which provide
a good source of heat and cover for rodents. Also, keep the lids on your
bins shut tight.
“Inside the house, take the plinths off kitchen cupboards once a year and
vacuum behind them. Eighty per cent of infestations occur under kitchen
cupboards.”
In my case, the first mouse wasn't so bad. It was a bit of a novelty. Hunting
it, pinning it down under a bookcase by building a wall of books (quite
high: mice can jump), then trapping it under a pint pot was quite fun.
Individually, mice are tolerably cute - like hamsters, only tiny and
frightened-looking. I set it free in some nearby woodland with a hearty
chuckle, not realising that the joke was on me. Because, despite what people
say, you don't get a mouse. You get mice. A pair can produce up to 120 young
in a year, and each of these will be breeding by the time it is 12 weeks
old. In perfect conditions, a nest of mice can produce 2,500 heirs in six
months, producing 18,000 droppings along the way. So, while a lone mouse can
be fairly appealing (you'll hardly miss the 3g of food it gets through a
day), the thought that your house is teeming with mice is vile.
My first reaction was to call the council, although vermin control, like
regular refuse collection, is no longer something that you can rely on your
local authority to provide: some still exterminate rats and mice free;
others have dispensed with pest control altogether; most charge between £20
and £30 for each visit.
In my case, the visit amounted to an “expert” putting down poison baits. The
problem with this is that a dead mouse a) always dies somewhere
inconvenient, and b) produces one of the worst smells in the world.
Floorboards were torn up, a cooker dismantled, the lining torn from an
armchair - all in pursuit of some decomposing rodent, to rid the house of an
odour that smelt like several thousand tons of rotting vegetables.
The problem persisted. I could have called professionals - Rentokil doesn't
charge for an initial survey of the problem. I should have checked the
small-print of my insurance - companies such as CIS offer “home rescue
packages” including pest infestation for about £25 a year. But what I did
was to buy some traps from a shop.
The first I tried were glue boards - small plastic trays covered in a glue
that first attracts the mouse, then keeps it stuck. They seemed somehow less
cruel than traditional spring traps, but a clue that this might not be the
case was the words “humanely dispose of” on the back of the box. Yes, having
trapped your mouse, you have to kill it. Hoping that it was true about
drowning being the nicest way to go, I would immerse the glue trap, with
mouse attached, in a bucket of water. At first I could do this with
stoicism; then I read an article about how scientists have discovered that
mice sing, and I found myself looking into the eyes of mice as they seemed
to plead: “What did I ever do to you, other than nibble your discarded
Shreddies crumbs?” (rats, incidentally, can apparently giggle, but that's
just creepy).
That's why I turned to traditional spring-loaded traps, baited with peanut
butter - no more hands-on drowning, just the distant click of the traps
through the night. It was grimly satisfying for a while, but there are
really only so many small, furry corpses with which you want to be dealing
on a daily basis, and only so many times you want to risk breaking your
fingers. Eventually, I bought a kitten. Yes, we wanted an innocent pet to
play with, but we also wanted a cold-blooded killing machine to bite the
little cheese-munchers' heads off, and the sight of Busby strolling down the
stairs with a mouse hanging from his mouth, little legs kicking furiously,
was as thrilling as it was faintly revolting. Luckily he never presented us
with a freshly slain corpse, preferring to disappear outside and do
unspeakable things to his prey before returning indoors looking smug and
faintly evil.
After four weeks Busby ran away in search of a better life, where he would no
doubt be pampered with Sheba rather than having to live on a diet of dead
mice. Before the mice could re-establish themselves, we invested in the
Pestclear 200 - not, sadly, a Robocat but a plug-in device that pumped out
ultrasonic and electromagnetic waves, both of which deter rodents. To be
frank, we doubted that it would work. Electromagnetic waves? Why not magic
crystals? To date, however, it does seem to have done the trick. Although
the ultrasonic effect can be blocked by walls or furniture, apparently the
electric current travels through the house's wiring, disturbing rodents
hiding in walls or floors and avoiding the need for a unit in every room.
Anecdotal reports on these units are mixed. Some people claim that theirs have
had no effect whatsoever, and even the manufacturer admits that a large,
well-established nest may choose simply to put up with the inconvenience and
discomfort that the devices cause. Where they work best is probably in
cases, such as ours, where the initial infestation had been dealt with; the
unit then acts as a deterrent to reinfestation. Having said that, it is wise
to invest a little more and purchase a unit with a “variable pitch” setting,
as this lessens the chance of your resident rodents getting too comfortable
with the constant background noise.
Then again, maybe the mice have just been biding their time. As I relax in the
living room, I still sometimes catch myself wondering whether there is
something nesting in my armchair, or climbing the curtains just beyond my
peripheral vision. Or in my kitchen, feasting on a cornflake.
That's the thing, you see. Getting rodents out of your house is one thing, but
it's not so easy to shift them from your head.
Mouse or myth?
Myth 1: You are never more than a metre away from a mouse.
This may be true in parts of the country, if you include rodents in sewers.
But Dr Stephen Battersby, a rodent expert, says: “There haven't been enough
proper assessments of the mouse and rat populations to know.” Surveys based
on complaints to local authorities put the number of rodents in Britain at
60 million.
Myth 2: You can't have mice and rats at the same time.
It is unusual, but as mice live in the lower levels of a building and rats at
the top or outside, you could have a problem with both at the same time.
Myth 3: Mice are not dirty.
Mice are more than just a nuisance. They have weak bladders and their
droppings may contain worm infections. A study of house mice by the
University of Salford found that 60 per cent carried the toxoplasma
parasite, which can cause birth defects in pregnant women.
Myth 4: Mice like cheese.
Mice like foods with a high sugar content, such as chocolate and peanut
butter, and meats such as bacon.
Myth 5: Tabby cats make the best mouse catchers.
Cats that live on farms are generally far better at catching mice than house
cats. The breed makes no difference.
Myth 6: Mice only come into houses in winter.
The common house mouse lives in houses all year round. Fieldmice are more
likely to bother you in cold weather.
