There's a mouse in my kitchen, and it's mocking me.

[tulip]

I was doing laundry a few weeks ago and just happened to look in the washer before I started putting clothes in. Usually I just open the lid and start stuffing clothes in. This time I looked, and thank goodness! There was a mouse in there. A dead one. It had not been washed. I have no idea how it got in because the top was closed.

[Owlie]

We found a rat in our apartment last night. DBF and I were sitting on his bed when I saw it run past and behind some boxes. We left the room and shut it in, with an old towel in the gap under the door. We called the maintenance line, and they sent someone out at 10pm on a Sunday night with two glue traps and a promise that a pest-control person would be there in the morning. I was a little leery about using the traps--I didn't want the thing in my apartment, but I didn't want to condemn it to a slow death from starvation or to chewing its limbs off. (I didn't want to dispatch it myself, either). On the other hand, I didn't want to end up in a possible legal situation with the landlord.

For most of the rest of the evening, the thing kept pawing at the door, trying to get out, and running if it saw either one of us through the gap between the door and the frame. In doing this, it apparently got its tail caught in one glue trap, and managed to free itself. We'd baited the other with peanut butter per the instructions from the maintenance guy. It quite happily ate it, with its paws on the plastic sides of the trap. I guess I scared while walking past, because it got startled and got its paws stuck...and managed to free itself again. (I was secretly glad, actually.) It spent the night in DBF's room.

The pest control guy took a look around the apartment to see where it might have come in. There's only two places, and they'll be fixing those tomorrow. He said it was probably a recent arrival--to the point where we probably caught it on its way in--and the only one. He also noted that glue traps don't work on rats. He set up two snap traps and gave us instructions to call the landlord if got caught (as well as how to get rid of it). Half an hour later, DBF and I heard this intermittent shuffle-shuffle-thunk noise coming from from his room. We opened the door a crack. The poor rat had gotten caught in the trap, but had tried to get the peanut butter from the long side of the trap. Because of that, there wasn't enough force to break its neck, so it was slowly being suffocated. It was nearly dead when the pest control guy got there to pick it up, so we didn't have to put it out of its misery.

DBF and I felt terrible. We'd liked the idea of the snap trap because it's relatively quick, unlike poison or glue traps. I like rats--I sort of want a pet one, once I'm in my own place and not an apartment. I'm okay with the idea of dispatching lab rats, because you have to do it quickly and relatively painlessly. I don't bear the poor things any ill will, because they're just trying to survive. I know what wild rats tend to carry, and that in the final analysis, it was either me or the rat. This was just...wrong and unnecessary, somehow.