Every Thursday is Goat-Free Simplicity day at Living Behind the Curve.

What goes “Squeak, squeak, snap”?
A doomed mouse in my basement.

As you may recall, we’re dealing with a mouse problem. It’s one of those situations that seems like it should be peppered with (ahem) cheesy jokes, but really, all we have in the American lexicon is the mental image of the stockings’n'pearls 50’s housewife squealing from atop the kitchen table while a cartoon cat attempts to catch the mouse and only succeeds in bumbling towards his certain doom.

Oddly enough, dealing with mice puts me in a rather introspective mood. You’re faced with the battle of woman vs. nature, forced to confront any shortcomings you may have as a homeowner, and presented with the simplicity of design possessed by the common mouse trap.

How do you save a drowning mouse?
In a box in the back of your freezer.

I’ve learned a lot recently about mouse control and mouse traps. The traditional spring-loaded trap, pictured above, is manufactured practically in my back yard. I don’t know if Victor is the leading world producer of this sort of trap, so it may be an artifact of my personal geography, but it’s the only brand I’ve ever seen. The phrase “building a better mousetrap” describes an exercise of pointlessness, because that little gizmo is about as effective as they get.

In case you have the pleasure of not being familiar with traditional spring-loaded mouse traps, let me explain the ingenious design. A spring is attached to a piece of wood, and a bar is attached to the spring. The spring firmly holds the bar to one end of the piece of wood. Set between the arms of the bar is a little floppy metal hook. The other end of the wood holds a hinged arm. To set the trap, you pull the bar all the way back against the spring, flop the arm over the bar, and hook the end of the arm under the floppy hook. Your trap is now set. Place the trap down carefully, and wait for anything to come by and gently jostle the hook, causing the arm to slip and the bar to snap back hard. Assuming it wasn’t your hand the bar snapped, you’ve got your mouse.

What’s brown, furry, and sits in the sand?
A mouse, when my cat is done with it.

You see, mice are dumb, greedy, and habit-prone. They don’t travel very far from their nests (a mouse can easily live its entire life without traveling more than about 10 feet in any direction), and while they may not hang out long in any one place, when they find food they will go back for more. They’ll eat almost anything, too. The conclusion we can draw from all this? Where there has been a mouse, there will be again.

The solution to killing a mouse, then, is to find out where it’s been, and set a trap for it. Of course, this begs the question “what sort of trap?” and makes you consider the implication of your trapping; do you wish to catch the mouse alive and release it elsewhere, or do you want to kill it outright? There’s an astonishing selection of traps to pick from on the Wikipedia entry on the subject, but when I went to the store, I had a choice of glue traps, spring-loaded traps, spring-loaded-don’t-see-a-dead-mouse traps, and poison.

How’s a mouse like a rubber ducky?
They both give a little squeak when you step on them.

Now, glue traps aren’t an option, really. They’re cruel, leaving a mouse only immobilized enough to gnaw it’s own legs off or starve to death, and I don’t have the ovaries to kill any glued mouse I might find anyway. Poison won’t work, either, because our cat is a highly skilled mouser, and if she happened to catch and eat a poisoned mouse, that could potentially be deadly for her. No deal. She’s just too good to take the risk.

So, do I go with a regular trap, or a noseeum? I picked the regular trap. The spring-loaded, Lititz-manufactured trap has been working quite well for more than 100 years. Why mess with success? It’s just simpler that way.

What’s more fun than a bucket of mice?
Setting a bucket of mice on fire.

I bated my traps with peanut butter, and so far, I’ve caught one. The bar came down right behind his furry little ears and snapped his furry little neck, and now his furry little carcass is rotting in my trashcan outside. He died quickly and cleanly. It’s a vicious, but elegantly simple solution.