The mice have been gnawing again, leaving traces of themselves all over my workspace. I see whiskers and droppings and bits of sawdust from the walls. I can hear them chewing in the silence, when I am reading or staring at the blank computer screen. After several more pleas to the property management company, this is the note I received from the building manager:
Hey zombie [sic] guy –
I’m not supposed to give you anything, but this should get rid of those rats of yours.
Charlie
Bldg. Manager
I sprinkled the poison around the places where the mice have been getting in, but it hasn’t been working. Nothing works.
Nothing.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
2 comments:
I can’t help but applaud your decision to make your private life public—nothing defuses unhealthy interest in one’s affairs like complete disclosure. BTW, I remember coming across an article not too long ago which was about mice -- actually, I believe they were voles -- that had developed immunity to certain types of rat poison. It was in Sustainability Midwest. After searching through the recycle bins, I came up with this:
Farmer’s Blight:
Old Poisons No Longer Work
June 16, 2005
“Jeb” Dunham surveys the damage to his fields with a shake of the head. “They’re destroying my crops,” he says sadly.
Jeb used to control the voles with an anticoagulant pellet which he placed in water repellent paper tubes to keep nontarget wildlife from consuming the poison.
“The poison doesn’t work anymore,” he says.
“This may be a lesson to us,” says Andrea Freemorgan, a chemist at the University of Iowa. “The Southern European vole—a non-indigenous species—is showing resistance to these types of poison, which were never the best for the environment anyway.”
“I don’t care about the environment,” Jeb says, as he stares out at his ravaged fields. “I just want something that works.”
Thank you for the article, erthwisdom. By the way, the decision to make my private life public was not my own.
Post a Comment