Thumps in my attic, mice and cookies and wayward wildlife

If you have read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie (Numeroff, 1985), you’ll remember the potential consequences of sharing a cookie with a mouse. You find yourself in a demanding relationship. . . . It started with occasional thumps in the attic, then evolved into what sounded like wild parties. Even my cats sat vigilant, watching the ceiling above my closet, as if something might fall through. A wildlife trapper left baited cages. And early the first morning, I saw a mouse had been caught. He was much too small to be the party animal. But still he had been caught and needed to be released quickly. A rooftop in the Florida sun is no place to be. Waiting for the trapper to return (eight hours later), I moved the mouse to the shade, gave him a name (Vito, nicknamed after a famous tango dancer) as well as some fruit to keep him hydrated. We were starting to bond. By noon, I moved the mouse down the ladder to a shaded brush area under a tree. By now, I have posted his picture on Facebook, and he’s getting lots of “likes.”

But he was wildlife and didn’t want to be caged. All those committees I served on monitoring the treatment of laboratory animals in a university made me question guidelines, concerning captured wildlife. By early afternoon, I had called numerous government agencies, each sending me elsewhere--county animal control, Fish and Wildlife Commission, Florida Department of Agriculture and within that agency, the Department of Entomology and Pest Control, which deals with rodents. My mouse, a rodent! I left a message, and to date, no one has responded. Finally, I called a friend at a school of veterinary medicine. We agreed--the most humane course would be to release the mouse to the nearby woods. The trapper arrived just as I was preparing the release mission. I plan to learn more about the guidelines for treatment of captured wildlife. My mouse was not demanding, but would he have been if we had started with a cookie?