Confessions of a humane mouse killer

Today I got to go to our neighbor's house to clean! They'd been having mice problems and they wanted a pretty thorough cleaning. Luckily Lisa was willing to help me tackle the job, so together we set to work and pretty much transformed their whole house! It was long (we skipped lunch and were there for about five hours), and we tried with difficulty not to be too meticulous, but it was still fun, even though we did have to deal with a lot of mousy remnants, seeing one or two in the process. Mr. W. found one that he thought was sick and carefully took it out to the woods, claiming that he was saving a life.

I liked Mr. W. It's strange because I've never met him even though he is my neighbor, but he lives in Denver part of the time so that would probably explain it. This sexagenarian host was very appreciative, and he also was fairly talkative. At one point he even "confessed" to me that he had some mouse poisoning around the house.

"I don't know how you feel about it," he told me, "But for years when we lived out West I hemmed and hawed about doing it but my wife finally convinced me. It kills them quite painlessly, but it still hurts me to do it."

I decided not to tell him that in my house we use mouse traps.