Caught another big-eyed mousey visitor under the sink. Asked James to take him to work to release him. James gave me a look. Guess not.

I was reading about deer mice yesterday, and evidentally my catch and release program is pretty damn futile. Deer mice will travel over a mile, cross rivers, and ignore better offers to return to home base. I am giving them a good nosh and a brief, puzzling journey. We may have to go over to snappy traps after all. (James, who can go from blowing up virtual zombies into showering explosions of gore to gently shooing an insect out the door with glass and paper in under ten seconds* absolutely refuses to use glue traps. And poison, of course, is right out.)

Armed with this knowledge of futility, I dumped the miscreant ten feet away in the back greenbelt and sighed. I tried to be nice. Really, I did. The irony is that I would happily feed the mouse to a snake without a twinge, I would praise Athena for catching one, I would toss dead mice down the gullets of practically any species I could name with a glad heart–but simply killing them because they’re annoying me with their unsanitary ways seems like a wasteful tyranny.

On the other hand, I’m sure that a dead mouse tossed out in the greenbelt would rapidly be usefully employed by any number of birds or nocturnal omnivores. But I still feel a twinge.

*James is my great refutation of the belief that violent videogames cause violent behavior, as he not only plays them, but makes them for a living, and you would be hard pressed to find a mellower and less violent individual. His general response to finding an enormous insect in the house is to look it up online and see if he can figure out what species it is.