First, before I jump right in, I’d like to present my brother Kurt with the grammar police badge. The last blog was a tad quite grammatically confusing. I fixed it-all of it I hope. I will endeavor to proofread a bit better this time. Here you go Kurt; your badge rivals Wendy’s. Maybe it’ll get you out of a speeding ticket.
Now back to today’s topic.
What gives me the right? How can I make such a decision? Who made me judge and jury? From where do I get the decision to take another life?
Today I’ve decided to strike back at the damn mouse that is taking over the garden. I’ve seen it twice—although I suspect he involves his brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins in his heist. My first round of planted beans are mostly leafless—I picked about three handfuls of beans before the mice attacked. The new plants are topless—although they are making an attempt at a recovery. My eggplant plant was taken down over the night, and the peppers are making a determined stand, but I’m not sure how successful their struggle is. The melon plants have long been decimated—gone completely. The little critters are even chomping at my cucumbers (the fruit not the plant). The nerve!
It’s frustrating. As my mom said, I didn’t plant my garden for the mice. That being said I feel horrible, guilty, and evil for even purchasing mice traps, but purchase I did. I made sure they were ones that promised instant death—no suffering. (I even hate killing insects if the first swat didn’t cause death. I don’t want anything to feel pain for my need to see them gone). These traps kill and keep the carcass in the trap and tell you when it has captured the rodent. I, therefore, don’t need to see the product of my horridness. Furthermore, to distance myself from the rodent murder, I made Marc set it up—although I was standing beside him handing him the bait—and Marc will remove the trap it when it indicates that the critter is caught. Kinda Pontius Pilate of me isn’t it?
We put in a raised garden to prevent the critters from taking over the garden. And it worked, until the vines from my cucumbers and squash provided a convenient rodent ramp to the beans and eggplants and peppers and melon (I think the melon would’ve been ok had they had the same amount of time to grow as the squash, but they were planted once the rodent ramp had already grown)… Maybe I’ll have to put in a second garden. One for the vine plants that are too hearty to chomp by the time they hang over the edge and a garden for the tender rodent food beans and eggplant and peppers. If my pests were only rabbits, this would not be a problem. I’ve never seen a rabbit climb a vine, have you?
So now, I feel horrible about the whole rodent killing thing. If I could relocate them and believe that would work I would, but I know it won’t. And I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to keep resetting traps…that makes me sad.
I am a horrible person, aren’t I?
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