How to Get Rid of Mice in Your Truck

Mice Hide Dog Food

Basically with mousetraps. The ones that kill. We found around 4 kg of dog food that the mice had nicked from Vaga’s food bowl. They had hidden it; behind the gas bottle; under the fridge, in the flat-screen cupboard; in the tent-poles bag (which is slung under the chassis); between the driver’s seat cushion and the frame… Poor dog must have been starving – we thought she was eating well. But she wasn’t – it was the mice. And that was in the winter, back in California – yes, we’ve had them for months now and it’s got to the stage…

The first thing you do is put all your food in mouse-proof containers but that just directs them elsewhere – for mice have to chew: if they don’t, their ever-growing teeth grow right up through their brain. They are forced to chew. And the next thing they chew is electrical cables and gas tubes: there was the faint smell of a gas leak; left front and rear speakers stopped working; the lights over the desk wouldn’t come on…. what if they started on some serious cabling in the engine?

So we bought two humane traps that trap the mice in a box. We caught the babies, who must have spent hours inside squealing and scratching and basically alerting their parents never to go near these kind of traps again. By the time we let them out on a patch of grass far from the truck in San Francisco somewhere – go be City Mice! They staggered around exhausted and went of to flop under a bush – surely to be caught by a cat  – those traps didn’t look particularly humane.

So next we bought the sticky paper stuff. We caught one smallish mouse and set it free but he must have alerted the family to the new danger because all we found on the sticky paper ever again was the tell-tale sign of patches of mouse hair. By now, we were getting properly fed up with the buggers. Vaga had already torn up her sponge bed one night when we left her alone in the truck: At first we thought she had missed us but I think it was a particularly frustrating night for her not being able to catch them even as her food was spirited away before her.  And it wasn’t just the dog – any normal-hearing person was kept awake all night with these rodents running around the double walls, in and out of cupboards, desperately trying to find something to chew on to stop their teeth growing out through their brain…

With increasing rage, then, we employed the standard, traditional mousetrap: Bang, bang – we got mother and father in two nights of death. They were beautiful specimens, glossy coats and all, well-fed on high-protein nourishing dried dog food, of course… Mice, no more. Now we have ants.

 

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