Committing mouse murder should be quick and unacknowledged

There’s an old saying to the affect that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Like a lot of old sayings, this one is full of it.

A penny saved is still just a lousy penny. A bird in the hand is likely to leave a little “surprise” on your palm, while the one in the bush will never be a problem. All work and no play make one Bill Gates and filthy, filthy rich.

Old sayings are dumb.

But it’s the one concerning the mousetrap I find most disturbing, mostly because a few manufacturers (of mousetraps) seem to have taken it to heart, inasmuch as they keep trying to build a better mousetrap. When there is NO need.

The perfect mousetrap was perfected long ago. It consists of a small, wooden rectangle upon which is affixed a spring-loaded thingy that — when activated by the force of a mouse trying to chew stale peanut butter off another thingy (I apologize for the technical jargon) — snaps closed and provides said vermin with a quick and (I hope) painless demise.

It’s one of the world’s most elegant and lethal machines and I’m surprised it hasn’t been enlarged and implemented in human warfare. It’s doubtful a well-trained soldier would go after a suspicious dab of peanut butter, but put an apple pie or falafel in that thing and who knows? Wars could be won or lost according to which side had the better bakers.

But I digress, especially when I try writing these columns after my second glass of wine before dinner.

My point is, there’s no reason to improve on the “classic” mouse trap. It works, you can get four of them for a buck if you know where to shop and mice, for whatever reason, haven’t yet evolved to the point they can’t see the danger coiled up there like a python in that little spring.

Still, manufacturers, being the greedy jerks they are, keep trying to find more expensive, less effective versions of the mousetrap to sell to unsuspecting rubes like me.

Because of my cat, Friday — who is to mice what Arnold Schwarzenegger as “The Terminator” is to women named Sarah Connor — I have no rodent problem. But I did at my last house, which was over 100 years old and rife with rodent-friendly entryways.

So I set out traps. But not the good ol’ tried and true traps — the new-fangled “be merciful to the mouse” traps. The kind with glue, that capture the mouse but don’t kill him. (Or her. I prefer to think of mice I’m trying to kill as “him” rather than “her” because of my upbringing. In my family, we did not kill girls of any species.)

At the store, that seemed merciful indeed. In practice, it left me with a squiggling, wiggling, panicky, screaming (yes! mice scream) rodent that I was forced to dispatch myself. In person.

I am not emotionally equipped to kill a small, helpless critter unless driven to it by great need or great hunger of which I have neither.

I wound up taking the one mouse I managed to catch in a glue trap out into the woods and freeing it by cutting away the glue trap around it’s tiny, mousey feet. I have no idea if the thing lived or died, slowly and painfully out there in the woods with little pieces of glue trap still clinging to its feet, but the guilt will haunt me forever.

If they really want to make a better mousetrap, they should come up with something that completely atomizes the rodent to the point that the user (me) is unsure if a critter ever was even caught.

I want to kill mice. I just don’t want to know I’m doing it.