We installed a cat door in the basement at our previous house. Smudge was in heaven. Inside...outside...inside...outside...without any of the annoying human interaction. As a bonus he could bring in his latest victim (spelled: b-i-r-d or m-o-u-s-e), let it loose, and try to track it down through the jungle we otherwise called the living room. We knew this because the house had a funky cathedral ceiling connecting living room and bedroom, which provided an acoustical front row seat to his late night safaris.

Strange tearing-the-house-apart noise in the middle of the night? Must be Smudge. If we ever had had a real burglar I would have stumbled downstairs and stuffed him out the cat door just out of habit. Bad burglar, bad!

Sure, we could have closed the cat door, but it was the result of carefully weighing the difference between two evils. An unhappy cat locked in all night taking it out on furniture and litter box, or clean litter box with an occasional kitty treat (spelled: e-n-t-r-a-i-l-s) squished between toes on the way to make coffee. Strangling the cat should have been the obvious choice, but we are slightly dim and slaves to pets.

What finally nixed the cat door was the realization that Smudge wasn't always re-catching the prey he let go in the house. We spent too many a morning trying to reason with panicked birds or corner crazed critters. We also started noticing holes chewed out of the corner of food boxes in the kitchen. Mice.

We bought some havahart plastic mouse traps, which really are quite clever. Slide the door open, put a tidbit inside, and balance it so that the lid stays open. Mouse walks in, balance changes, door shuts, mouse locked in.

In the morning I'd check the traps and if any were closed, heavy with mouse, I'd take it along for the commute. We lived a mile down a dirt road so somewhere around three quarters of a mile I'd pull over, lean out the door, ease the trap open and give it a good shake onto the roadside. What emerged was a nervous mouse, wet with sweat, that zipped right into the woods.

I sometimes wonder about those mice. Did they find a local country gal and settle down? Suffer through new mouse on the block syndrome? Maybe they have homing instincts and worked their way back to the house? It might have been the same few mice being driven down the road each day. A scary, but free, commuting system. Like the LA freeway.

Joey, our favorite Accordion wielding programmer, shares a great little story about his bad karma mouse incident.

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