The mice are back. Have been for some time, but haven't yet managed to get beyond the utility room. Caught on their route to the kitchen. Great big, rustic Meath mice, with ears the size of an elephant. The only way with them - if you haven't a cat, of course - is the spring trap. Not long ago, the New York Herald Tribune quoted a saying attributed to Ralph Waldo Emeron: "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door."
There is some doubt about the attribution, even to the more elegant and wordy version given in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: "If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." There is still some controversy, even though one Mrs Sarah S.B. Yule (1856-1916) states, in a book, that she copied the above in her hand book from a lecture delivered by Emerson.
The Tribune tells us that, according to a magazine American Heritage, the mousetrap is the most invented machine in the country's history. The patent office of the US has granted more than 4,400 mousetrap patents. Nearly all of these traps are meant to be quick and violent, says the Tribune, the most surprising being those that electrocute or explode. One rather sadistic device lures the mouse onto a treadmill. What to do with the creature then? Anyway, the snap trap which we all know was invented in 1899, according to this account, and it outsells all other American mousetraps combined.
Cheese is denoted as the bait for this device, but experienced, crafty trap setters know that the clever mouse can manage, in many cases, to nibble enough cheese without setting off the deadly execution bar. You have to use something attractive, but hard to get off the trapdoor or platform. It has to be delicious to lure them on, it has to be solid enough to mean they must work for their supper. Melted black chocolate hardens into an irresistible and almost infallible lure. Perhaps melted fat. Never tried it.
But back to basics. Your ordinary snap trap wins every time. As the newspaper wrote: "The better mousetrap, it would seem has already been invented." Yes, you'd like simply to discourage them, rather than kill. Some writer advised putting walnut leaves where the mice entered. They didn't apparently like the smell. It didn't work.