OK, we all know, I am a wuss, prone to ask for sympathy when I have to deal with a mere foot-o-agony for a few days when many other folks have problems that are much worse and aren’t going away any time soon.
But you didn’t know how deep the wussiness goes. Let’s plumb the depths a little bit further. I don’t think we have enough line to make it all the way to the bottom, but it might still impress you.
Several days ago, when I was out in the yard, I saw a small rodent run under the gutter conduit. I moved the conduit to see if it had constructed a burrow underneath and when I started to pick up the shielding, the creature let out a surprising cry of rage and started pulling the shielding away from me and back over itself–showing a lot of moxie against an opponent that outweighed it by a factor of more than 1,000 (maybe 2,000). Before it gave up and made a strategic withdrawal to the underside of the porch, I had a chance to get a good look at part of it, and it was obvious to me that it wasn’t a mouse or a rat. Perhaps it was a vole, or a shrew, or even an escaped hamster? It was a mystery. I wanted to know.
So, I bought a live animal trap. My plan was to trap the thing, get some photos, figure out what the heck it is, and then, if it wasn’t something nasty or diseased, release it again. (If I’d wanted to simply kill it, that would have been much cheaper and easier.)
Then, after briefing my wife on the situation, and showing her how the trap worked, I went out of town on a business trip.
You can guess how this ends. Things came up, and my wife utterly forgot about the trap.
I returned from my trip and checked the trap. There was an ordinary but extremely dead mouse in the trap. My guess is that the mouse had gone into the trap within a few hours of when I set it–we have oodles of mice, so I expected we’d cycle through several of them before we caught the mystery creature, if ever. And then, for the next few days, the poor mouse had slowly died what I imagine was a horrible death by dehydration.
This was not part of the plan. There wasn’t supposed to be any killing. We’d worked out the whole plan so that the creatures we caught might actually come out ahead from the whole experience (depending on how much they enjoyed eating the tasty bait). But we didn’t follow the plan.
I find myself strangely upset by the death of this creature, which, if left to its own devices, probably would have perished at the hands of one of the local cats or coyotes before reaching a mouse’s old age anyway–because its death was pointlessly painful and my fault.
So, what’s your story?
