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. Rhineland mice had a contemptuous saying, ‘As common as prelate-meat.’

Mice can begin to mate at seven weeks, and reproduce throughout the year, with an average of 5.5 litters and 31 young per female per year in buildings and 57 in farms. Some mice are very small — adults only three inches long including tail and weighing less than half an ounce. Hence Shakespeare often uses ‘mouse’ as a synonym for tiny, as in the Dover Cliffs speech in Lear, ‘The fishermen that walked upon the beach/Appear like mice.’ But their numbers make them formidable. Mice population explosions in the Central Valley of California in 1926 and 1941 produced up to 80,000 an acre. The fact that the first was caused by unusual heat and the second by unusual cold cast doubt on claims by the Greens that the present outbreak is (of course) the result of global warming.