"I only hope that we don’t lose sight of one thing - that it was all started by a mouse”. Those are the famous words of Walt Disney, a little mouse named Mickey gave him the road to fame. But, many people don’t know that mice are just as clever, cute, and sweet in the real world like Mickey, along with being beneficial to the ecosystem. The Mouse, aka Mus musculus, is a small fuzzy rodent with a long tail used for helping with balance and regulating body temperature and small front legs which also act as hands similar to ours, they are most commonly mistaken for their larger and more predator like ancestors, the rat, aka genus Rattus. Rats are actually known for being capable of eating mice if they’re starved enough, however both rodents are highly capable of affection towards humans. Now, what’s so great about mice you may ask? The main thing is their affection towards humans, both wild and domestic mice are capable of this affection when one learns to gain their trust. I work with mice both domestic and wild on a daily basis. You may want to ask if I’ve ever been bitten by a mouse, the answer is yes, one time 6 years ago when I was still a kid. I never fully understood the concept that humans and companion animals weren’t the only animals capable of feeling pain, I was living in my mother’s ex boyfriend’s house, who was a drug addict constantly hounding my mother for her pain meds and even threatening to harm her if she didn’t hand the meds over. The entire kitchen was rigged with snap traps, one day I opened a cupboard to a mouse who had their back leg broken by a snap trap. I picked up the trap with the mouse in its clutches and toyed with the mouse who was so scared and hurt, they swung around on their broken leg and latched onto my thumb. That was the day I learned to never screw around with lethal mouse traps ever again. I have three former lab mice and one wild field mouse in my sanctuary, the former lab mice are named Sunshine, Charlotte, and Maggie, and the wild mouse is named Pikachu. The lab mice all look the same by color, but they each have unique characteristics that makes it easy for me to tell them apart. Sunshine is the largest mouse, she looks like she’s obese, but that was how she was bred, but she is living her best life and moves around really well. Charlotte just looks like a normal mouse. Maggie has her ears all scarred up from a scratching issue she has, which appears to be a mental issue and we can’t stop her from scratching, but we can keep her comfortable so she can be happy. Pikachu is really easy to tell apart from the other mice of course, he’s brown with a white belly, he also has other characteristics the domestic mice lack. He has larger, more forward facing ears, his eyes are larger, and they’re more of a black color, almost like tapioca pearls in boba tea. But Pikachu’s differences on the outside don’t stop him from acting like the other mice on the inside, he has a lot of similarities to the lab girls. Pikachu loves to burrow and construct his own little bedroom out of bedding like the lab girls, he loves to hide his food in places, drink out of a water bottle, chew on wood and cardboard toys, and run on a wheel. Someone would probably say that Pikachu acts like a domestic mouse, but do we ever stop to think that maybe domestic mice act like wild mice instead? A mouse has a lot of roles in the wild, the most common and not very pleasant role we know the most is their role as food for other animals like birds of prey, some species of snakes, skunks, foxes, and coyotes. But mice also have more pleasant roles in the ecosystem, another common role we know of is how they clean up decomposing matter and waste left behind by other organisms. They also fertilize the soil with their droppings, disperse seeds for new plants to grow, help fungi grow by storing it and carrying the spores around, and some species of mice are even known for being pollinators such as the Namaqua rock mouse, the Wild mountain mouse, and the Cape spiny mouse. Mice do so many wonderful things for the world, especially the wild ones, they recycle and create new life. So why do humans want to assassinate them so badly…? Despite all the beauty mice are capable of bringing into the world, humans wish to be ugly with them, from breaking their necks with metal bars attached to wooden boards to gouging their eyes out and painting floors and walls red with their guts and blood as if they’re trying to perform a satanic ritual. It was all believed to have been started when mice were falsely accused of bringing the Bubonic Plague, when it turns out the virus was caused by a 6 legged parasite known as the flea. Fleas have always been the host of the plague and new studies are possibly finding that lice could also be potential carriers of this disease. In fact, Japan used this information to weaponize plague infected fleas in the 1940s, they dropped paper bags full of these fleas on Chinese cities, killing 109 people with a plague outbreak. So why are mice getting blamed for an incident that very much most likely occurs every day? If humans didn’t have all of these antibiotics to save them, what would we do? Would we kill all cats and dogs the same way we do to mice? As long as fleas are alive, plague will always exist, it’s unrealistic and extremely cruel to think killing all mammals will get rid of the plague when the host of the disease was never a mammal in the first place. So if it’s considered morally wrong to kill cats and dog even if they’re most known for carrying fleas, then why is it okay to use fleas to justify the killing of rodents like mice? It’s clear that the plague never had anything to do with wanting to decimate an animal weaker than a human. Some say Hantavirus is a good reason to kill mice too, but why? The National Institute of Health confirmed that you only have a 0.00071% chance of catching Hantavirus from a mouse, according to the CDC, only 10% of mice carry the Hantavirus disease, which even if it does make it into your home, the bacteria is very weak to heat and sunlight. So, if it’s not disease that prompts people into killing small innocent animals, what is it? Some say it’s supposedly the destruction mice cause, mice do have a tendency to chew a lot, because they have teeth that never stop growing, and like any other rodent, they have to chew to stop their teeth from overgrowing. If their teeth overgrow, it’s the equivalent to when we have bad teeth that give us nasty aching pains, especially the kind of pain that leaves us looking like we’re gasping because of how difficult it is for us to close our mouths. When mice look to establish a warm home safe from the elements, they also need to look around for their hygiene products to contain good teeth care, a mouse in captivity would use cardboard, wood toys, and hard food like seeds and pellets to keep their teeth worn down. Unfortunately not very many wild mice are lucky to have that like Pikachu is, especially with all the human development taking over and taking down natural areas where mice used to roam. So house walls are as appealing to a mouse as a shoe is appealing to a puppy or a chair is appealing to a cat. There are ways to prevent your house from becoming a chew toy to the mini woodland version of a puppy, the main way is by making the house less appealing like you would to stop your dog from chewing or your cat from scratching. Mice hate the feeling of tin foil and steel wool, so if you can locate the holes the mice are getting in and out from, you can shove a steel wool or tin foil ball in that hole then seal up the entrance. Mice also have dislikes to certain smells and sounds like cats and dogs, lavender, peppermint, cloves, ammonia, and ultrasonic noises deter mice from wanting to hang out in areas too. So we covered there’s no need to justify killing mice for “protection” when they’re not capable of hurting you. But what really has people so convinced that they need to kill mice? It’s hard to decode what makes a person develop the fetish for killing them, many people have discussed gruesome fantasies with mice, talking about imagining them dissolving in the stomach acid of a predator animal like a snake or to engage in Vorarephilia with mice in other ways, gouging their eyes out with needles and throwing them out into the wild alive and blinded, trapping them in bathtubs and pouring scalding hot water on them, trapping them on glue traps and electrocuting them with prods, smashing them with shoes and cooking pans. Greed is a more obvious influence, big mouse trap companies use misleading pictures and wording portraying mice as magical sewer mutants that are capable of spreading Mousie Cooties with a single touch. Mouse trap companies such as Decon and TomCat need to manipulate their customers into buying their torture devices, like how pesticide companies picture bees as killing machines with swords on their butts and caterpillars as if they were logging companies deforesting the Amazon rainforest. If the media didn’t demonize mice, lethal mouse trap companies would be out of business. But in all reality, why would you want to start a business of hurting and killing living beings? Especially when your business kills a lot more than mice. A lot of people think these kill traps are the way to go, like snap traps, glue traps, and poison. Because people are falsely misguided into thinking that breaking an animal’s back, burning their organs from the inside out, and leaving them stuck to rip out fur, break bones, and resort to chewing off their own limbs is “humane”. The short answer is no, those are not humane, there’s no humane way to break someone’s spine, poison them, suffocate them, crush them, etc. There’s no humane way to kill anyone.. Especially when it means “Unintentional targets” suffer too. All predators of mice, domestic animals, other small wildlife, and even children fall victim to the cruelty and selfishness of lethal mouse traps as well. Annually rodent poison injures and kills over 1 million birds, over 10,000 children, thousands of non targeted wildlife such as foxes, snakes, coyotes, wild cats, skunks, and wolves, and over 100 domestic dogs and cats. Glue traps have injured and killed chipmunks, squirrels, hamsters, bluejays, sparrows, chickadees, robins, geckos, skinks, salamanders, bats, frogs, toads, raccoons, opossums, skunks, chickens, parrots, cats, small dogs, and children. Snap traps have injured and killed birds, squirrels, chipmunks, cats, dogs and children. People also think cats are a great way to kill mice, this is false as well and horrible for the well being of cats. I’ve also rescued cats that were forced to work as mousers, they were extremely malnourished to the point of being unable to walk due to not being fed properly. Many people that rely on their cat to kill mice will intentionally starve their cats in hopes they’ll be hungry enough to kill mice. While mice aren’t easily capable of transmitting diseases to humans, they can transmit diseases to cats such as roundworm, salmonella (Because a live mouse isn’t cooked meat), Leptospirosis, and as discussed earlier, they can also ingest rodent poison from a mouse that has already fallen victim since it can take up to a week for a mouse to die from the poison. Encouraging a cat to hunt can also lead to aggression in cats, an issue that results in the euthanasia of 1.4 million cats annually in shelters due to not being suitable for indoor life for most people and carrying out their aggression on other native species when mice cannot be found or are too hard to catch. In fact many cats that aren’t desensitized to prey animals will prefer birds over any other animal, cats have been responsible for the extinction of over 70 bird species and the endangerment of many more such as the world’s only flightless parrot, the Kākāpō. Cats that become unsuitable for indoor life because of this destructive behavior also are more likely to become victims of car accidents, native predators, aggressive dogs, shootings, other lethal traps, poisoning, animal experimentation, disease, and other devious human activities. In Conclusion: Mice are nice, people who kill them are not. You can’t say mice are deadly to people and domestic animals when the methods used to kill them also bring down billions of other animals and people on a yearly basis. Walt Disney is right when he said everything started with a mouse, because a mouse’s fate also determines the fate for many more. The answer is Not To Kill.