To think Alan could just kill the bloody mouse?

[Alanisadick]

Some of you may remember my thread last year (under a different name) from Alan’s kittenhood, about how the dirty little bastard kept pissing in the house, largely in reusable shopping bags. Thankfully those days are over but now I have an objectively worse problem.

Anyhoo, him and his sister Hattie have recently got into murdering things. It started with giant worms, and now what I’m getting is mice, shrews, birds and even a fucking massive frog. My wheely bin has become a morgue for the local wildlife.

Get a cat they say, then you’ll never have a problem with mice! WRONG. I never had a single mouse in the house until those two little feckers came along. And now, one of their victims escaped and has been having a rare old in my kitchen for about 3 months now. There’s mouse shit in the cupboards and drawers (thankfully not in any of the food cupboards), and recently when I opened a little used drawer, the mouse back flipped out of the drawer onto the floor and scarpered away. Proper jump scare. DD2 saw it last week sat under the boiler on the worktop.

Why those two furry little eejits don’t just kill it, I don’t know. Instead they bring me yet more mice in and murder them. Every time I find a dead one I hope it’s kitchen mouse but sadly not.

So, long story short, how do I get rid of this bastard mouse? The cats are clearly not going to help me out here. I will caveat this by saying I am quite literally petrified of mice and I’m a single parent. I know the options, old school traps, humane traps, poison. None of them sound good when you’re very scared of mice. I think poison is out because I do actually love the useless cats and don’t want to poison them. I’ve read that humane traps are actually the least humane thing to do as if you take a mouse out of its territory it will just die a horrible death. So do I have to get a Tom & Jerry style head snapper? I don’t want to but also I don’t want a mouse in the house really.

Photo of Alan for reference, he’s not quite the full ticket in his defence.

Snappy traps are actually quite clean in operation, I must have killed half a dozen mice using them, each one crushed instantly around the middle with skin intact (so no gore).

Sorry, no advice about the mouse, but that pic of Alan is priceless! What a gorgeous cat.

Ah ok, I guess maybe it might not be too much worse than removing them from the carpet then, except I tend to do that with my eyes half shut with the dustpan and brush at arm’s length. I think it’s removing the mouse from the trap that would be the problem for me, though I guess I could just lob the whole thing in the wheely-morgue 🤷‍♀️

@watcherintherye thank you, he is rather lovely 😊. Never a dull moment, honestly he’s not wired up right that one.

Mousetrap. Snap kind. My two are about a year older than yours, they have just now calmed down with the wanton killing. We had to take the cat door out last year because they would take turns catching bunnies outdoors and dragging them inside to be slaughtered. Have you ever heard a rabbit scream? This was a nightly occurrence.in our house. Highly entertaining for the beagle. And they also populated the kitchen with paroled mice.

Alan is divine!!!

Oh. I couldn't kill the mouse. It would have to be the humane trap and back to where they're catching them. I'd give it a chance. After all, your house isn't its natural habitat but it seems to be surviving quite nicely.

The exact same thing happened to my sister and it made its way into her unused conservatory which was a storage room while they had work done. It found the cat food and it found a rack of clothes she was putting on ebay. It ate the food and gnawed and ripped up the clothes to make a bed. To have babies in!

All gone now but it was a nightmare. So defonitely deal with it sooner than later.

@Alanisadick

I also have a dickhead cat named Alan.

Alan catches things and plays with them and then tries to bring live things into the house.

He once brought home a sodding huge magpie and it was furious.

Alan is clearly a misunderstood, witches cat. He is stocking your larder with all of the ingredients you could possibly need. Good Job Alan!
I’m a chocoholic. I’ve tried to encourage our cat to hunt in the local corner shop, but she’s not quite there yet. Alan might be a faster learner.

@thenewduchessoflapland no way!! There’s two of them?! 🤯 it is a great name for a cat, especially comical when you’re standing at the back door and calling ‘Alan’.

I have to be up for work in 5 hours. Thought I could hear something in the corner of the bedroom but hoped I was imagining it. Alan is now here and crashing around behind the laundry basket with his murdering face on, so looks like I was right 😞.

I ordered some snappy traps on Amazon just now.

I love Alan.

I agree with the snappy mouse traps, bait them with Snickers bars as the mice love them and almost run to the traps to get them.

Meet Simba, he was as useless as Alan in solving the mice problem.

Oh OP, and Alan! 🤣🤣🤣🤣

I have an Alan, except he's called Mitch. In his prime was a prolific serial killer. Our house backed into a piece of wasteland behind a hospital and was Mecca for him.

We had mice, thousands and thousands of them. 99% of the time dead, usually just a head or guts left in the doormat as a present for me. I once found one dead once in my laptop bag, bent into a u shape where I had been merrily shoving the laptop in day in/day out.

Then there was the one who was trapped behind a bookcase and died a death.....we only discovered it when the house became infested with bluebottles. Minging.

(With ref to your current problem, we used humane traps to evict a few persistence mousse hiders. I hated handing them though and juts wished the cat would just kill them!)

We had dead squirrels, the odd rabbit and once a koi carp which I think was a lucky break from a neighbors pond.

But the worst was the whooping big fat pigeons he would bring in. Bloody fat, massive ones. It was actually quite impressive how he dragged them up and over the fence. I'd find them under the bed, half eaten, guts and seeds spilling out. The wee bastard brought them in half alive so they would sometimes flap about, shitting and bleeding.

The absolute worst is when I was in labor with my first child......he brought in a half dead pigeon which I finally managed to get out the back door, I then proceeded to scrub the stair carpet to get rid of the blood - I was in tears, and contracting (I had rung DH at this stage so he was en route home) so I suppose it was helpful to be rocking on all fours (albeit with rubber gloves and scrubbing brush in hand).

We then moved house to a more city centre location and the killing reduced drastically. He also lost his (psycho but non killing machine) brother so Mitch became a solitary cat, I think he actually became bit depressed.

We've since moved again, this time to the country and I feared this might fire up his love of hunting - plenty of opportunities but it's virtually nothing now. He's 18 and sleeps most of the time. Still quite sparky but clearly can't be arsed.

Good luck. Love your pics of Alan. He looks like a right character. I'm am however thankful those days of finding something dead and squishy are behind me.

@killercatmum OMG 🤣 Mitch sounds like an even bigger dick than Alan. Although at least yours actually ate their prey, mine are just in it for the kill, they’ve never once even taken a nibble of anything they’ve murdered. I think they could be psychopaths. It’s encouraging that they may grow out of it though.

If I’m at home when birds are brought in, I’ve sussed out how to save them. I grab a tea towel, and chuck it over the bird while it’s lying there frozen in fear, shout at offending cat to bugger off, wrap the bird up in the tea towel, gently carry it to the garden, unwrap it on the grass and they have always flown away. Fine if I’m here and awake, but if I’m asleep or not here then it’s bye bye birdie, and the house is scattered with feathers as well as a corpse.

Oh and I can relate to the one behind the bookcase - at the weekend I got back from a few days in France. A friend had been staying here looking after them and as soon as I walked in I noticed a god awful smell. Took me bloody hours to locate it, finally found a dead mouse inside a welly boot in the hallway which was rotting away 🤢.

@Gingerkittykat good shout on the snickers, I will definitely try that.

Tell me about it. Picked up a carrier bag the other day only to find something squishy on my hand and it was a decaying shrew who’d managed to escape the clutches of Penguin only to shuffle off the mortal coin in the bright orange environs of a reusable Sainsbury’s bag. Then this morning KitKat had left three small dead rodents under the dining table, each with their heads bitten off but not eaten, so she’s just biting stuff in half for fun.

I’m telling myself it’s a phase and they’ll grow out of it, but given the dcats are in charge of the house, I expect I’ll just adapt to their ways over time.

My dickhead cat invited his fox friend in the house to play chase - I'd rather a mouse 😂🤦🏻‍♀️

My friend shoved her boots on one morning to go feed her chickens. Thought it was a left over sock in the front....
It wasn't...
Half chewed mouse in her boot..
Oh and bare feet...
Yuck.

Haha OP I do this too, but I take my glasses off first 😂

Solidarity from one hunter house to another. Boy cat has taken to putting live mice in his basket of toys.

I'm curious why people who have cats who bring their prey indoors have a cat cat flap. We had a hunting cat but never had a cat flap. Is their convenience really worth it?

No advice on the mouse I'm afraid - I have spent many happy hours catching and releasing mice that ours have brought in alive though.
Alan is if course gorgeous, this whole thread is merely a stealth boast about how cute your cat is 😹.
Have you pinched my cat btw?

Deal with the mouse - snap trap
I have been without a dishwasher for the best part of 2 weeks and am now £200 poorer due to a mouse chewing through the pipe and electrical cord. They are little buggers, old house in the countryside so I can't even blame a cat bringing it in.

@Grumpyoldpersonwithcats wow they have to be related, surely? 🤣

@ErrolTheDragon the cat flat was put in long before the killing spree started. And also they now do their tiddle-craps outside which means I don’t have stinky litter trays in the house or have to buy cat litter.

Alan is a FINE name for a cat and tops my list of names for as-yet-unrealised-additions to my team.

On the basis of Alan Cumming, Alan Partridge, Alan Turing and Alan Rickman. All great Alan's.

Mine will be called Alan.

Full name Alan RickCat.