The Better Mousetrap

"You can't imagine…
the things I've seen."

My cat's become a veritable mouser. He caught one that fell out of our hallway closet a few weeks ago, but this past week he caught and killed three more in just two days. (Alright, one suffocated in the tuperwear my mom eventually trapped it in and I'm pretty sure one drowned in his one blood, but still, all dead as direct result of feline aggression. That's like two counts murder-1 and a man-2.)

We started thinking about laying out traps. They haven't evolved much, but if you pay extra you can get one of those non-lethal little cages or sticky-pads. As cliched as it is even today, the adage seems to be true, you really can't create a better mousetrap.

That seems like bullshit. Surely, someone can create something more efficient or more effective without compromising the simplicity of the tool. The guillotine and short-drop gallows were both improvements over remarkably similar devices. Why not the mousetrap?

Probably because I keep a cat. It's self-cleaning, can literally sniff out mice wherever in the house they may be, hunts them, adapts to the situation–truly, a thinking tool–and is near 100% effective. Hell, if you don't clean out this trap fast enough, it even disposes of the carcass itself half the time.

Still, I don't have to feed those little wooden spring traps. Or clean their poo.