The pest I’ll never forget: the cats who filled our house with live mice

This is a cat-and-mouse story in which the cats are the real pests. My old house, despite being next to rodent-filled woods, was blissfully mouse-free … until, during lockdown, we got two kittens, Mimi and Ruben. As soon as their fine motor skills were sufficiently sharpened, they started hunting. Thankfully, they weren’t into birds, but wood mice became their specialism. I suppose the dearth of mice indoors meant they had to catch them outside. The tabby twins would then bring their prey back to their lair (our house) and release them, still miraculously alive. Perhaps they thought mice would make fun pets.

You would know they had brought in a mouse when they sat guarding sections of ill-fitting skirting or gaps under cupboard doors, uttering odd “prittering” sounds. Cue us humans moving furniture and dashing about, getting down on our hands and knees, reduced to hunting the mice ourselves with upturned Tupperware boxes. If we caught them, we released them in the woods, locking our yowling cats inside so they couldn’t see exactly where. But some mice inevitably escaped into the fabric of the house.

I don’t blame the mice – they didn’t choose to invade us – but it was disgusting when the cupboard under the kitchen sink became smelly with mouse poo and wee, so I caught the culprits in humane traps loaded with peanut butter. I find mice adorable and on one occasion fell for a particularly plucky one who kept getting dragged back in after I’d released it. Rescuing it for the third time, I was so moved by its plight that I held it close on a piece of kitchen towel, in an attempt to bond with it. Instead of thanking me, it bit my finger and I had to get a tetanus booster. Bloody cats.

During what seemed like a nice, quiet time on the hunting front, the fridge began to stink, a faint smell of rotten-eggs gradually growing into a putrid stench. When I moved the fridge out to look behind it, I found the most horrific scene. There is a trough on the back of fridges to catch water that dribbles out, so it can evaporate. This trough had become a toilet for the confused mice, forced by my cats to live indoors. You couldn’t detach the trough, so it took hours to absorb the slimy liquid in endless wads of balled kitchen roll before I could scrub it. Thank God we no longer live next to woods.