Message board topic:

The colder weather drove a mouse into the house.  Fortunately for the mouse, Van Gogh never saw it.

I saw it twice last night in the kitchen and discovered that he'd chewed into a brand new loaf of bread, eating a hole in it about twice his size.

This afternoon I caught him on a glue trap.  Glue traps aren't quite the death sentence for a mouse that they are for bugs, but you can't just pull him off either.  It would tear him apart.  You can slowly work him off the trap with vegetable oil.  It's a really messy and really tedious job and I wear gloves to keep from getting bit, but at least you won't pull his feet off.  Once they're off, they look pretty greasy but I don't think that'll hurt anything.  He's out in the back yard now, which is where I threw the remaining bread.  As long as Taylor or a bird doesn't get him, I hope he'll be OK.  John

You should have given him a little black leather jacket to make him a proper greaser. ;)

He could have used a jacket as there was plenty of gray fur left on the trap.  Once free though, he was in no mood to stick around for a fitting.  No sign of him today but I wouldn't think he'd be in any hurry to come back inside and risk going through all that again.  Poor little guy was terrified.  Besides, there's a whole loaf of bread out in the yard now.  John

I have to wonder if he managed to get to his friends and they all began to lick him for the oil/food.

I kind of think he was a loner.  I've never seen any others.  I do wonder how long it will take for him to look clean, or how he'll get clean.

This is only the second mouse in the 15 years I've been here.  With the first one I tried live traps baited with peanut butter.  Every morning the peanut butter would be gone and the trap would be empty.  Those traps are now buried, mouseless, in the city dump.  John

I always had luck catching the pack rats in the live traps, but only bait that worked well for me were Oreos.