Technological warfare against mice won’t work. Try cats

Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted as saying: ‘If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.’ I don’t know about the first two commodities. There are too many authors churning out words, and who cares for a sermon these days, let alone the preacher? But mousetraps that work, that actually catch mice! Now you’re talking, Waldo! I hear nothing, these days, but complaints about mice. What’s the word? Infestation? Epiphytic? Zymosis? Pandemia? There has been nothing like it since 10th- and 11th-century Germany, the time of the Pied Piper, when mice were directed to ‘get’ objectionable people, like the Rhine-pirate Freiherr von Göttingen, Archbishop Hatto, the robber-baron Count Graaf, Bishop Adolf of Cologne and Bishop Widerolf of Strasbourg — all without exception eaten by armies of mice down to their whited bones.