The Mouse in My Own Home by Anonymous

A response to Logan Janssen’s “The Souls of Small Creatures”

You’re laying in bed, but you can’t sleep. Your room is certainly warm enough, dark enough, and yet, it seems abuzz with activity. The pitter-patter of small steps above you makes you question if you’re imagining it or if it’s real. Frustrated, you make your way to the kitchen for some water. From the dark crevice between the fridge and the stove, you’re being watched, you just don’t know it yet. So, you reach for the faucet to fill your glass; you see a flash of movement in the corner of your

eye. Your head snaps to it, and there it is, the sixth unitmate you only suspected existed. The mouse sits very still on the counter, mirroring your own immobile frame, and you stare at each other for a long second. Can he even see me?, you wonder in passing, since its eyesight is supposed to be poor. Before you can react, it scurries away, weaving between the spice containers and disappearing into who-knows-what narrow space behind the furniture. You return to your room, sort of shaken, knowing the mouse likely climbed back up the minute you left, still seeking the scattered morsels of food that you’d carefully wiped away after dinner. As sleep finally takes you, you’re resigned to the fact that you’ll be the one to clean up its droppings off the counter in the morning.

All that in your own home… it was supposed to be the safe place you go to rest and eat, the place you retreat to when feeling vulnerable or stressed, the place where you can be yourself. But then, the mice are there through it all, and, little by little, is the home even yours anymore? 

You keep your food locked away so it’s not “tempting”, you clean up religiously, you stuff every hole in the wall with steel wool, you become wary of opening windows for fear that they will climb in when your back is turned. All along, you’re hoping, just hoping that it will be enough, that you will have made your space unattractive enough that the intruders lose interest. But how messed up that is…!

Deep down, you realize a mouse has the same needs as you – food, shelter, safety – and you have all the compassion for its struggle, but it is also fundamentally not like you. You don’t sneak into someone’s house in search of food, you don’t relieve yourself on their floor to mark your passing (hopefully). Above all, you are technically endowed with enough reason that, when someone communicates that you are not wanted there, you take the hint, leave and don’t come back. We don’t get that with a mouse. We can set up all the compassionate traps, fill them with the most appealing food, and it will still blatantly ignore them. If we’re lucky, it might go into hiding for a while, until we let our guard down and forget a sliver of something on the counter, and it will swoop right back in.

Why would it be immoral to defend your home when you’re threatened? Because, make no mistake, mice are a threat: the simple fact that they leave feces in the area where we make food and in places we don’t even see poses a danger to our health. It’s somehow worse that they probably don’t realize they’re doing anything wrong, but at the end of the day, would you feel any less sick knowing the other didn’t mean to make you sick? So, you want them out, you want them to stay gone, but you can’t very well communicate that to them; you have tried to be merciful, still, they remain. Why is it wrong to set up kill-traps after you’ve tried everything else and nothing worked? After all, you take no joy in the killing of a mouse, you don’t celebrate the death of another being, but you also cannot live alongside it in your house. If this were outside, we wouldn’t get to complain, since that’s where animals rightfully live; but in an indoor space set up for human habitation, I think we have the right to decide about what other animals can stay there.

I imagine the main point of contention in the mouse discussion is one of approach: if their presence bothers you, which method of removing them is most appropriate, most ethical? I would personally draw the line at cruelty. Glue traps and poison are undoubtedly out by this metric, but spring-based kill traps would be fine (I don’t see a quick death as being inherently cruel), and so would no-kill traps (although a devil’s advocate might argue that the stress you’re causing the animal by catching them, then giving them a bumpy ride many kilometers away from their home is cruel in its own way). Ultimately, it feels like the choice is made irrelevant by the fact that neither option is very effective, at least not in the experience of my unit. There will always be a mouse in your UCU home...