HA! Hahahahahahahaha! I have to go get more coffee now because when I saw that mouse trap picture I spit it all over my desk.

Ha! We have a mouse too and that rat bastard is a genius. My husband has tried the plain ol' wooden traps. We wake up, and the traps are sprung but NO MOUSE. My husband is turning it into war and calls the traps and poison, his "arsenal". I like animals and usually don't want to hurt them but have reached the same point you have. Kill the little fucker and get it out of my house!

We have some turnips. I'll let you know how it goes.

I'm picturing the mouse lying dead next to Jason's trap, a tiny little smile on his face and his little paws wrapped around his furry belly - dead from laughter.

Hey, it could work.

Hysterical! Apparently Max lost his bet with the mouse and was the one who had to try and get to the food.

Peanut butter laced spring traps are the way to go against mice. Mice are the enemy. Ask not for whom the trap springs. It springs for them.

Ahh...forget the humane traps...get one of those that breaks the f@#$er's backs. That would be more humane than the slow death from the heart disease the little bast@#$ will surely get from eating all your food, wouldn't it?

Seriously hilarious!
Would have been awesome if it had worked.

Your post reminded me of this game.
https://www.cartoonnetwork.com/games/tj/trapomatic/index.html

(It's Tom & Jerry's trap-o-matic.)

That is HILARIOUS! I wish he would have connected a string and sat and waited for the mouse, and then pull the cork out, and trap the mouse.

One question...actually two...

1. How was he going to get the mouse out from under the bowl if he caught it?

2. What woud he have done with said mouse?

I am all for humane but really? That is too funny - which I am sure is exactly what the mouse was thinking!

(wiping the tears) Thanks for the much needed laugh. The best part is "root vegetable based". We need to incorporate more root vegetables into daily life.

I am laughing my head off. Poor Max. Then again, it serves him right for not being a mouser in the first place!

So awesome, thanks for the laugh. I applaud your husband's efforts at humanely catching the mouse. His care and sensitivity is great! However, I'm totally with you, it's time to "nuke the bastards!"

Man it would have been so amazing if that actually worked!

OMG, that was too funny! Mad props for ingenuity. I'm sure that was one very confused cat though....

Thanks so much for the laugh!

What was the plan IF IT HAD CAUGHT the mouse?

Also: Awesome creativity !

I remember you saying years ago on your blog that your husband was a Republican. This makes up for that.

So my whole family, but especially my dad, are a bunch of softies when it comes to animals, so when there was a rat (RAT!!) in the walls of my parents' house, my dad trapped it and released it in the woods like a mile away. The next night? That rat was back. My mom (resourceful Kindergarten teacher) tried to think of what would repel the rat and came up with the idea to get a recently shed snake skin from a pet store. Which they did and which they dropped between the walls. Rat took one sniff and packed his bags...he did not want to be someone's dinner. Problem solved, no animals harmed.

Wait. I don't get how the mouse was going to trip the trap. how would he knock the cork over? those things are TEENY!

Also, when we had meeces, we put out a bajillion traps and never, ever caught one. Our cat caught a few live ones (AND BROUGHT THEM TO ME IN BED, as I have mentioned, the memory makes me want to scratch all my skin off), but even the exterminator's traps never worked.

I've tried the "humane" mouse cube thing (clear plastic box with a one-way door) but the experience was so harrowing (if successful, you have to PICK UP a CLEAR BOX containing a PANICKING MOUSE and LET IT OUT with YOUR FINGER) but I don't think it ended up so humane because I was so freaked by having to carry that wiggling box with a poor little rain soaked rat and see his little beady eyes (and his tail! that pale, hairless ratty tail!) that I only made it across the street from our house before chucking the entire box as far as I could into the bushes. The box is probably still there, with a little rat skeleton in it. And I feel bad about it.

So my new thinking is, killing it as efficiently as possible may be more humane (relatively speaking) than allowing it to live on and have dozens of mouse babies which someone will eventually kill anyway. Not great moral reasoning, but it helps me sleep at night.

Hilarious!

This must be a guy thing. I once had a friend construct some elaborate mouse trap for his girlfriend. I think it was a piece of cheese inside a plastic fishbowl that was tied to the ceiling fan. the idea was that the mouse would enter the bowl, knock it off of the counter (he had it balanced on the edge) and hang suspended from the ceiling. I think there was also something attached to make a noise so he would wake up. Don't think it ever worked.

I think that is the most perfectly shaped sweet potato I have ever seen. Root vegetables FTW!

Nuke away woman! Don't feel like you need to be nice to the mouse. It might have some crazy transmittable shit like Hantavirus. I'm all about lovin' the fuzzy wuzzy animals but when it comes to rodents in my house . . . not so much lovin' going on there. Not to freak you out but you should check out the CDC's website for some tips. https://www.cdc.gov/rodents/

I had rats in the college house I lived in. It was my responsibility to dispose of them, which is not so much fun. My question is how does Jason plan to get said mouse out of the bowl once trapped. I imagine him dancing around with such glee that the plan worked. Having thought no further about how to get it out his tone might change rather soon

That is so something my husband would do. That is, if he wanted to capture the wee, sleekit beastie alive. But he's not as tenderhearted towards rogue animals; he actually used his bow and arrow to shoot a rabid animal on our property once. It was kinda awesome to see him defend our land that way. So maybe my husband would be okay with the scorched-earth rodent removal technique after all.

Trying not to wake the napping babies as I snort out loud - thanks Amalah.

Once you trap the mouse. How are you going to remove it??

We have tried several different traps.

The only, and I mean ONLY, ones that work are the Victor traps, the kind that snap their necks. And baited with peanut butter.

Caught four in a span of 60 minutes.

Four. Mice. With diseases. Ew ew ew ew ew.

I love animals. I bring birds to the wildlife rehab so much that I KNOW they call me the Crazy Bird Lady behind my back.

Mice gotta go. They have diseases. They poop everywhere. And they use their own pee like Hansel and Gretel used crumbs, to find their way home.

BLECH.

HAHAHA oh this is one of the funniest things I have ever seen.
I think of myself as a nice person but it doesn't translate to rodents. They are to me what volcanoes are to you and I want them dead and gone.
But one of my friends is much, much more tender-hearted than I and so, when a mouse kept creeping into his house, went to Petco. And asked for a jar of snake poop. SNAKE. POOP. And sprinkled it outside where he thought the mouse was getting in, to deter it. He claimed it worked, and that snake poop is scentless to humans, but I remain skeptical. I also remain unwilling to be the crazy snake poop lady at Petco.

So I've been sitting here laughing my own fool head off at this crazy plan when I retell it to my husband with the coda: that is so something you would do. He came over all indignant with a "NO! I mean, what's the cork going to do?"

Exactly.

Now Jason must start a blog on new and innovative ways to catch vermin. Because yeah, those things called 'mouse traps' really never caught on.

Perhaps tomorrow you'll find bite marks in the sweet potato...

Seriously, though, enough with the catch-and-release program; break its little rodent spine already!

If your husband isn't already an engineer he should be.

i was all for the "snap their freakin backs" traps til one got his nose snapped and he bucked and flailed all over the basement floor in a panic - and i had to find a way to get rid of the harbinger of disease AND the trap stuck to his face.
we have a little metal have-a-heart now, that we leave down there and catch em from time to time and do the mousy relocation program with them.

but the bowl and the potato, that is priceless.

Maybe it's the 4th vodka tonic talking, but this is one of the funniest things I've ever seen/read. Totally drunk chuckling here.

HA! That is hilarious. Mice are actually pretty clever little critters. They're pretty good at figuring mechanical stuff out. I know this because I have a mouse... as a pet. Stop looking at me like that! He's really sweet and loves to sit on my shoulder while I type. Now stop looking at me like THAT! LOL

Seriously, wild mice are not so tame, but still fairly wiley. I recommend using a gravity style trap, but the kind that works like this: the mouse walks up a see-saw type ramp, which goes down to let him in, then it swings back up again when he steps off it, preventing escape. We had friends who bought a different kind of humane mouse trap that didn't work as well.

You know what else works pretty well? Don't laugh. Put a glob of peanut butter at the bottom of an empty milk jug. Mice LOVE peanut butter. They climb in, can't get out. Pretty simple. I used it once in my garage and caught THREE.

About your cat, I was cracking up at that too. My cats don't know what to do with mice either. I let Moose (I named I mouse "Moose") out one day and he ran up to one of my cats, who was chowing down on a treat, and HE STOLE MY CAT'S TREAT. And my cat... SHE LET HIM.

Seriously.

My husband and I once set up a crazy contraption to catch mice. We put a 5-gallon bucket on the floor next to the kitchen cabinet. There was a ruler balancing on the counter sticking out over the bucket with a glob of peanut butter on the end. So a mouse would climb out to the get the peanut butter and fall into the bucket. But we could only catch one mouse a night this way, and there were clearly more than one. After a few nights of scared mice in the morning they started to figure out how to get back out. So I had the brilliant idea that if we put a layer of vegetable oil in the bottom of the bucket, the mouse's paws would be to slippery to climb out. Which worked, but then we had cold, oily mice to release. Poor things.

Then we bought those plastic live capture traps, but once a mouse was in one its friends would chew holes through the plastic from the outside to release him.

We eventually got regular spring traps.

Oh hon. We had a mouse in our couch recently. OUR COUCH. Which I still don't sit upon. Because it was in our COUCH. Also, I don't do much laundry anymore as that was its entry point for us. So we are wearing dirty clothes and sitting on the floor. Good times...

Well, to start, this was hilarious - I like Jason's admittedly misguided soft heart.

I was like you in that I got so tired of escaping rodents I insisted we get real traps. My then-husband said fine but if you want to kill them that way you have to dispose of them when they get whacked in the traps.

Needless to say it only took one brutally murdered little mouse to move me back to the not-so-reliable humane traps. I still can't get the image out of my head.

It's like a messed up episode of Tom and Jerry....

My husband humanely caught a mouse in our house once, and let it outside in our back alley. Guess what was back in our house two days later? I like the sticky traps.

It is so frustrating when the cat won't so much as twitch a whisker!

But of course the Storch family mouse would know to sniff the cork first, before sampling the goods inside the bowl.

This is quite possibly the funniest thing I have EVAH seen on the internets:)

My daddy (in Alabama) decided to eradicate armadillos one year. He would go out dressed like Elmer Fudd, shoot the armadillos and then bring the dead little creature back and put it next to the barn ----in a neat little line of dead armadillos --he got up to 16 before Mama made him bury them (the smell, you know). He's a preacher. It was a bit disturbing.

I spat water on my computer at the POSSESSED MIXING BOWL image. Thanks!

LOVE IT! I had to send this link to my friends!