Mouse Trap

I know three ways to kill a mouse. Squeamish already? Then stop reading right now, the going will get even worse. Reading on? Then don’t bitch later that I didn’t warn you! So let me start again. I know three ways to kill a mouse.

1. Hold the mouse down by pressing the first three fingers of your left hand on its neck and with your right hand pull on its tail until you hear the crunchy sound of a bone snapping. This is called cervical dislocation.

2. Take dry ice in a tall jar. Put a cloth on top of the dry ice. Then drop the mice, one after the other, into the beaker and cover it with a lid. If you are of the perverse kind you can take immense pleasure in watching them twist and jump, suffocating inside the death jar. I’ve seen some mice jump 10 times their height. Teach them pole vault and Sergei Bubka will develop an inferiority complex. Dry ice is frozen carbon-dioxide, all of minus twenty degrees cold. The mice die for lack of oxygen. The CO2 fills up their brain and starves it of oxygen. The cloth is to collect the involuntary discharge of pee and poo.

3. Inject Avertin, twice the body weight of the mouse. It goes into a coma. Now comes the moment of truth. Open it up and have a bloody ball. Cut out its liver, dissect the muscle and take out fat. You can have the brain for free, only, you will have to cut the head off and open the skull up. Avertin is a muscle relaxant sending the mouse on a ride to rodent heaven or hell. I don’t know.