If You Find a Mouse on a Glue Trap (2023)

September 14, 2018•24 comments

If you find a mouse on a glue trap, he’ll eyeball you with one black shiny eye while breathing in and out faster than you have ever seen anything breathe. You will panic, though you know the mouse is panicking harder. When your husband points out that the mouse is not alone in the furnace room, you will notice a second glue trap, stuck with the coiled carcass of a garter snake. When the mouse starts to struggle, you will tell your husband to kill it, no save it, and you will run to your phone and search “how to remove a mouse from a glue trap.” Articles will tell you to use oil, so while your husband brings the glued mouse out to the back walkway so that your three young sons, in jammies and waiting with popcorn bowls for a Saturday-night Christmas movie, don’t see it, you will hunt for the carafe. Outside, the mouse will sniff and stretch from the trap. Wearing snow boots over your own jammies, you will, for a moment, think he can free himself. But he won’t. You will cover his body with an old tri-fold cloth diaper and douse his legs with olive oil. Your husband will say, “He’s going to smell too good to predators,” and you will tell the mouse, in all honesty, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry you smell delicious.” You will dig under his legs with a plastic paint scraper. When his front feet clear the glue and hit the cold slate, the mouse will yank his back legs so hard you’ll think he’s pulling them clear off. The rear left foot will pop free. When the mouse stops reaching for a moment to rest, you and your husband will peer at his rear right leg, which is now bent like a wishbone. You will dig under it with gusto. The leg will stretch again, like nylon. You will sob and apologize to the mouse, because you knew the glue trap was left in the furnace room by your home’s previous owner, but by the time you remembered to remove it, it will have served its purpose, her purpose. You will tell your husband, the mouse, and yourself, that you are the kind of person who rescues stinkbugs, who found a hopping frog in the kitchen and talked it into a cup, who feeds the chipmunks and squirrels and made friends with the garter snake before finding it perished. Resolved, you will say to your husband, we have to kill the mouse, it’s only humane, and he will say, “I’m not a person who kills things!” And yet here you are, two people who don’t believe in glue traps and who don’t kill things, kneeling on their new walkway and killing something, killing it slowly. You will free the mouse’s back right leg. He will try to scurry on the mangled stick, land in a hump of snow, and spin round and round, toiling to get somewhere but too broken to go. You will collect yourself. The mouse will stop circling and lie still. You will dig a hole around him and say, “The furnace room is so warm, isn’t it? That’s why you found your way in there.” You will hope for hypothermia. Your husband will throw out the paint scraper, the diaper, and the entire bottle of olive oil. You will retrieve from the kitchen pretzels, granola, chia seeds, and a piece of cheese and sprinkle a snack circle around the mouse. You will say goodbye, then tell him to surrender. You will return to your family and watch a holiday movie as the boys munch on popcorn and ask for more. When they are in bed, you will not take any more chances and will search the furnace room, garage, and crawlspace for more glue traps. In the morning, you will find the mouse’s frozen body, graying and covered in frost, still in the snow grave, all the snacks gone except for the seeds.__

Suzanne Farrell Smithis a writer, editor, and teacher. Her work explores memory, trauma, education, parenthood, and the writing life, and appears in numerous literary and scholarly journals. She is the author ofThe Memory Sessions, a memoir without memory, forthcoming from Bucknell University Press. A Connecticut native, Suzanne graduated from Trinity College and moved to Manhattan, where she taught elementary school. With master’s degrees from The New School and Vermont College of Fine Arts, she now teaches writing workshops and literacy education. After sixteen city years, she moved back to Connecticut, where she lives in a creek-cut valley with her husband and three sons.

Photo by Therese Brown

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24 responses

Jan Priddy
September 17, 2018
Thank you for this. I would not rescue a stink bug, but garter snakes and bats. My husband would throw the olive oil away too.
Reply
- Suzanne Farrell Smith
  September 17, 2018
  I recall thinking something about the olive oil in the moment, like, oh the whole bottle? Well, it’s an old carafe, it’s just bulk oil, not good salad oil. How our minds drift and then suddenly land somewhere.
  Reply
Laurie Easter
September 17, 2018
Wow, Suzanne, you had me right there with you, although I have been known to kill a few things. Such detail and urgency and compassion.
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- Suzanne Farrell Smith
  (Video) Why You Should Never Use Glue Traps For Mice
  September 17, 2018
  Since the issue went live, I’ve been thinking about what I kill without second thought: yellow jackets and carpenter ants.
  Reply
Emily Brisse
September 21, 2018
I’m going to use this next weekend in a class I’m teaching, Suzanne. I really do love it. I keep thinking about it, probably because I, too, have met with a mouse on a glue trap, and no, nothing else breathes that fast.
See Also
How to Unstick Children or Pets From a Mouse Glue Trap? | A Detailed Guide - peSTopped Can You Put Peanut Butter on a Glue Trap? (Do This First...)Do Mice Squeak When Trapped? - Pest Control Zone How Do Sticky Traps Work?
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- Suzanne Farrell Smith
  September 22, 2018
  Thank you so much, Emily. I’m still having trouble with the experience, but writing it in this way helped me feel less like a monster for what happened!
  Reply
Robbie Gamble
September 22, 2018
Incredible story, grippingly told. Took me back to an incident years ago, when I lived in an old five-story tenement on the Lower East Side, and someone set a glue trap for mice in the basement. The problem was, we had rats, and one of them stuck a foot in the glue trap, which was far too small to subdue him. He just dragged the trap after him, and for weeks after we could hear him rattling up and down inside the tenement walls, as he went about his ratty business.
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- Suzanne Farrell Smith
  September 25, 2018
  One comforting detail of your story, Robbie, is that he didn’t try to chew the trap off. I too lived in the city, in Midtown Manhattan for a long time, and witnessed rat after rat after rat. Living in the woods away from most humans is teaching me to be more humane.
  Reply
Kurt Caswell
September 24, 2018
Hi Suzanne,
(Video) Mouse caught in horrific glue trap horror!
Just wanted you to know, I love this piece dearly. I’m using it in my nonfiction workshop in the Honors College at Texas Tech.
Kurt Caswell
Reply
- Suzanne Farrell Smith
  September 25, 2018
  Kurt, thank you so much for sharing that with me. I’ve long admired your work (especially since Sue listed In the Sun’s House as a must read). I think you taught at VCFA after I graduated so I wasn’t able to benefit from your wisdom in person. It means a lot to me that you will find use for this piece with your students!
  Reply
- Suzanne Farrell Smith
  September 25, 2018
  Kurt, Thank you so much for sharing that with me. I have long admired your work, especially since Sue listed In the Sun’s House as a must-read. I think you taught at VCFA after I graduated, so I was not able to benefit from your wisdom in person. I’m honored to know you are using this piece with your students!
  Reply
Judith Hannan
October 16, 2018
This was gripping. I found myself in so many of the sentences.
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Diana Castro
October 22, 2018
This story reminded me of our own debacle when my son stepped on a wooly black and orange caterpillar he had just been admiring. I was at a complete loss as to what to do to assuage my son’s torrent of tears. Half of the caterpillar was still squirming so a quick heartfelt funeral was out of the question. I finally came up with a story about how a caterpillar ambulance was sure to come but we should go as they might be put off by their natural shyness towards humans. Phew! That worked.
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- Suzanne Farrell Smith
  November 3, 2018
  Oh my. What an imaginative way you found to help ease yourself and your son out of the moment and on to the next. Lately I’ve been faced with questions of death, as my eldest is now six. It’s a lot all at once. What happens when people die? Why can’t people come visit us after they die? When we eat chicken, are we eating real chickens, like the chickens at the farm? I admire the way you found a story with recognizable details (ambulance) to handle that one. (I may have to steal it if the moment presents itself!)
  Reply
  (Video) How to Get Rid of House Mice (4 Easy Steps)
Cooper Gelb
October 25, 2018
This was an amazing piece! Thank you for sharing.
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Donna Steiner
December 5, 2018
Heartbreaking. Wow. Thank you.
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Debra Eder
December 24, 2018
Suspense! Chills! Goosebumps!
I didn’t see this piece when it was first published. It was “revived” (recommended) by Emily Brisse in a thread started by Jessica Wilbanks in Binders Full of Creative Non-Fiction.
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Laurie Lynn Drummond
May 8, 2019
Sweet baby everything, this is glorious and horrible and heartbreaking and so beautifully written and that last sentence just about did me in. Thank you for your huge heart. And thank you for capturing the franticness of hurting the thing you are trying to help even though you know that ultimately, that thing is doomed.
Reply
- Suzanne Farrell Smith
  September 17, 2019
  I didn’t see your comment in May, and was here to read the new issue today when I came back to this piece. Thank you so much for putting into words your experience as a reader. It means quite a lot to me!
  Reply
(Video) Glue Traps: Indiscriminate Cruelty
Suzanne Farrell Smith
September 17, 2019
I didn’t see your comment in May, and was here to read the new issue today when I came back to this piece. Thank you so much for putting into words your experience as a reader!
Reply
Rose Strode
October 24, 2019
I think one of the things that amplifies the horror and sadness of this amazing essay is the way the title and first line echo the familiar “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,” story. In the children’s story, the cookie is just the beginning to an increasingly close relationship with the mouse. In the essay, snacks and warmth also lead to an increasingly close relationship with a mouse, although this relationship is horrifying and heartbreaking.
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- Suzanne Farrell Smith
  November 6, 2019
  That book, and all Numeroff’s books of the same series, was very much on my mind (and on our coffee table) while I worked on the piece. My boys love the books. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts.
  Reply
Caren Lissner
October 1, 2020
Great piece. I found my way here because a mouse got trapped in a glue trap in my apt that I didn’t know was there (behind the oven). We only found out too late. We had seen him a week ago and put humane traps out; too bad he didn’t find his way into those and instead found the old glue trap. We heard squeaking and called exterminators and they found him. I’m sorry he/she suffered like that. Anyway, you’re a good person.
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- Suzanne Farrell Smith
  April 22, 2021
  I just found your comment, Caren. You’re a good person too. As humans, we can do better. Glue traps ought to be banned.
  Reply