Unwelcome Guests

Do you see that little brown stuffed animal horse stuffed into the left of the cupboard? We found Mary's horse! This was a horse her Daddy bought her when he was on a business trip in Texas and there have been many tears shed in the last few weeks over the lost horse. At several bedtimes, Mary was crying in bed over her horse while Daddy and I searched the house for it. It turns out that the horse had been stuffed by said toddler into this cupboard of mine that obviously I do not open very often, as evidenced by it containing my pasta maker and fondue set! (Those were both gifts, which is why I own such esoteric cooking devices. I do love pasta and fondue.)

So, what had me opening this cupboard, you ask? It all started Monday morning . . .

No, no, it started earlier than that. It all started the prior Friday when Charlotte experienced a deluge and serious flooding. We received seven inches of rain in six hours and at least one person died (see here for dramatic flooding photos). Apparently during those kind of rains, the highways and byways of little rodent burrows we don't see underground get flooded out and where do you think those fuzzy vermin head?

For dry land!

So come Monday morning, my dear children are returned from their travels and I am making them breakfast (their favorite oatmeal and brown sugar pancakes to welcome them home). I ask John to get out the children's plates, which I keep in a lower cupboard so they can reach them themselves. I wasn't looking at my child when he asked innocently, "Mama, what are these black dots on my plate?"

Cue Mama screaming.

Those black dots were mouse droppings. Because my family had been out of town all weekend, I hadn't cooked and so hadn't opened any of my lower cupboards since Friday morning before those rains. Indeed, mouse droppings were found in all of my twelve contiguous lower cupboards, on both their upper and lower shelves.

Which leads us to the state of affairs we are in today . . .

I have emptied the now contaminated cupboards and have begun running all my belongings through the dishwasher. (The contents of the cupboards aren't even fully tallied in this photo, as there were still some cupboards stuffed full, the dishwasher was full, and I had covered my window seat with more items.) The dishes on the counter top have been cleaned. The dishes on the floor have not yet been cleaned--but I can't really clean them now anyway because I have no more space to store them for now. (Although it has occurred to me to devise a temporary storage system for clean dishes using perhaps paper grocery sacks or cardboard boxes in order to have counter space.) I had lovely plans for my Monday, but this is what we call in domestic home management A Change of Plans.

The plan is to leave the cupboards empty until the mouse problem is "resolved", as they say. Then I will clean the cupboards (with bleach?) and stuff every miniscule hole with steel wool. (FYI: mice skeletons are more like cartilage than bone, so if a mouse can get his nose into a hole, he can squeeze his whole body through the hole.) Then I will replace all my clean dishes. In the meanwhile, I don't have much of a functioning kitchen (although certainly far more functioning than someone without a kitchen at all! I am grateful).

Our handy dandy and very trusty pest control man came out by one o'clock on the Day of the Discovered Droppings. (My father owns a pest control company in California, so I have a fondness for pest control men and the duties they perform!) That is how I learned of a new federal law (cue ominous music).

Why didn't we just dash out to the store to buy some D-con traps to "resolve" these mice? Because they are now illegal!

1. Second-generation anticoagulants in loose form are now illegal, so that includes Brodifacoum (e.g., D-con). First-generation anticoagulants are not very effective.

2. Scattering Brodifacoum was standard practice in places like crawl spaces under homes (where pets and children did not go--and it's a good home owner's responsibility to keep a crawl space boarded up so cats don't wander in there!). Now the only option is to hire a pest control man to build special bait stations (big, heavy) that he places in there, that are not as effective, and cost $30 apiece (so one crawl space might cost $200 to treat).

3. Minimum purchase of second-generation anticoagulants in the proper form for residential use is now one pound--when the need is only a few ounces, so the price is going to be very high.

Can anybody guess what is going to happen now that managing a rodent problem is going to go from costing about $10 to a couple hundred dollars? How many families are not even going to bother treating? How many more vermin will populate and disease spread because of this?

All of this new EPA law is supposedly because there were 15,000 ingestions (not deaths) of "pets and children." Isn't your first question (as was mine) how many children versus how many pets? How many dogs got into an unsecured crawl space versus, you know, the baby? Does it really take a political sciences major to figure out why the government lumped pets and children together (as if they are equal)? The pest control man told us just how many grams it takes to kill a 21-pound dog and, while I forget the number, it was a very large amount, difficult to find and consume. And that's killing the creature, when a slowly-getting-sicker-for-days creature can easily be given vitamin K as an antidote. Not that I'm all for unintended poisonings, but look where this hypervigilance is getting us!

Now the standard treatment for mice is snap traps. Seriously? Do you know what a hassle snap traps are? (Our pest control man does: he just had to lay out 300 snap traps in a 30-story high rise downtown. How easily do you think those are going to be monitored for dead rodents?) Plus snap traps are not as effective at killing many rodents. Each trap has the potential to kill one vermin. Our pest control man has had a long-term contract to keep down vermin in a fenced-in empty lot (down the road from us) owned by a developer whose hotel plans fell through. The owner still pays $300 per month to have the rodent population kept low in that field so the vermin don't overrun the nearby grocery store, restaurants, and high-end homes off the nationally known golf course. Of course, this is done effectively by scattering granularized anticoagulants. But no, that is now illegal so the huge field will be treated with snap traps. These snap traps will be visited once every 30 days. So, even if dozens of snap traps are placed (have fun finding those in a field with chest-high weeds!), they have the maximum capability of killing dozens of rodents, while rodenticide has the capability of killing hundreds or thousands of rodents. Do you really think there are only dozens of rodents living in one gigantic field? Oh no, my friends. And soon the nearby homes, restaurants, and grocery store (where I shop, thankyouverymuch) will meet those many-more-than-dozens of rodents who will now overpopulate that field.

Truly, most of these new rodenticide laws are about "being green." Don't get me started or I'll write even more words than I've already written.

Recently, certain companies (perhaps Raid and D-con among them) have said outright that they refuse to comply with the new EPA laws, which means they simply will no longer manufacture and sell residential rodenticides. They're not going to bother selling ineffective products.

In the meanwhile, retailers are allowed to sell any stock of the good stuff (e.g., Brodifacoum) until their stocks run out. The law went into effect June 4, 2011, so run to your nearest hardware store and stock up! As long as the poison stays dry, I don't know of a reason it will go bad.

And, yes, I see that one of our snap traps caught one nasty little vermin overnight. ("Good morning, dear husband!") How many more are there? I've never heard of a little hermetic mouse living in solitude. I was advised to wait until I see no more rodent activity for three to seven days, and then I can reasonably go ahead and replace my dishes into cleaned cupboards. How I'm supposed to function in my kitchen until then, I'm not really sure!

I'd better put away my soap box for the morning now and get to my children, who are waking up and pitter-pattering downstairs! At least, I hope that is the pitter patter of children's feet and not mice!