Invaders - ?, Mad Jack - 0

Zero.  As in null, nada, none, and go piss up a rope.

I got up in the morning and ran the old trap line, and the traps were still set but the bait was gone.

Rant follows.  Read at your own risk.

Both Traps - No Varmints 

Trap 1 - Cleaned of Bait

Trap 2 - Completely Cleaned of Bait

I expected a dead or critically wounded mouse.  Instead I got nothing.  No mice, no bait.  Trap 1 got cleaned first, so okay, maybe the trap is a bit defective.  Clearly the bait is good, as peanut butter does not evaporate.

I must be dealing with a superior type of mouse.  

I'm 69 (a fine number!) years old, and I have no idea just how I got where I am today.  Hard work had little to do with it, at least not on a constant basis in my later years.  Hard drinking, sure.  Hard partying, you bet.  Diet, exercise, and good lifestyle habits?

Ha!

Ha! Ha!

Ha! Ha! Ha!

But I made it, and a lot of this I attribute to the old saw, The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.  I come from a long line of heavy drinkers and hell raisers, all of whom are the victims of evolution.  Somehow, usually through chicanery and obscuration, they survived.  The past four generations of my family to perish of non-violent natural causes reached a ripe old age of 85-95, or thereabouts.  So, four generations of evolution.

The common mouse has a lifespan of 12 to 18 months - again, non-violent natural causes.  The mice who survive are the generation who learned to clean the Victor mousetrap of peanut butter without triggering the trap.  The beta group were always second in line, but as the alpha group evolved the beta group was eliminated.

So it's time to get serious.  No more Mister Nice Guy, offering up a last meal and a quick and clean death by the pulverizing of the vertebrate.  Nope, no chance in hell.

Lacking a cat, or best yet, a mother cat with kittens, I'm resorting to the old tried and true mouse paper sticky trap.

Some years back I worked for Bell Laboratories, Inc., which was a real learning and growth experience.  What I can tell you about Bell is that the product is good to excellent, and that it's a shitty company to work for.  Bell is a proprietorship, owned by the daughter of the company founder, a self-made man.  He was probably an alright sort of man; the daughter runs the company mentally and morally in absentia.  In plainer language, she's a 14 carat chrome plated bitch on a stick, and her interests are confined to her royal fucking self and her boy toy, AKA tall gray and gruesome.  The fucker doesn't work, which keeps his attention focused right where she wants it.  The controller (my grand-boss at the time) is also every bit as nasty as a rusty razor in shaky hands, and I don't have anything good to say about her.  This attitude, by the way, carries down throughout the company, although I have to say in all fairness that my immediate boss was pretty much okay and concentrated on keeping his head above water.

The R&D department is constantly reformulating and testing their product.  They do a good enough job with this, although half of them could be eliminated or replaced with cheaper labor.

I don't approve of poison.  It's indiscriminate and unsafe for everyone, including the vermin.  Not all bad, right?  However, what we have here is heavy duty, industrial grade flypaper that attracts rodents of all kinds.

That's what I'm using.  Rodenticide paper.

Tomcat Products by Bell Labs

One in the Kitchen Corner

One on the Kitchen Counter Next to the Failed Traps

Now, Mister Highly Evolved Mouse, we shall see what we shall see.