Column: Two legs good, four legs better

One of the best examples of me being a hypocrite is in the way that I view household pests, like boyfriends. No, I’m kidding; I’m talking about mice.

For the most part, I don’t believe in killing anything unless you’re going to eat it, but mice are a special circumstance because they eat the food that I would like to eat.

And that’s where the trouble is because I see wasting food as a crime against humanity.

So, if it’s between my ciabatta bread being devoured by varmints, or lining my house with every mousetrap known to man, then I choose the latter.

Now, perhaps this seems harsh, and that’s because it is. However, let me explain.

You see I’m a farmer. I grew up in a house that was built pre-Civil War on land that I believe was a mouse burial ground for all the little mice that were caught in humane animal traps. They all congregated on a tiny plot of land in Northeast Ohio, thankful to be saved, built villages, established trade, constructed tiny towers honoring past mice mayors; then with no warning the Thompson family swiftly destroyed their entire civilization.

It’s been an all out war since 1848.

I remember as a kid going to a friend’s house and seeing their mother lash out irrationally when she saw a mouse sitting on top of her refrigerator.

She began obsessively cleaning and pouring bleach on everything. I was baffled. At my house mice were a constant fixture, there was no point in trying to exterminate them completely, the goal was always just to control them.

Our fear was not in the germs and disease that they might bring into the house, but more so that they would lead an all out revolt and eventually get all the animals in on it. Real ‘Animal Farm’ style.

Perhaps I’m not being clear enough; I lived in a mouse-centered universe and thought the world was run by mice. Not understanding electricity, or well anything as a youngster, I thought traffic lights were run by tiny little mice. I believed that the lights were timed according to how long it took the mice to run along the wires.

Reflecting on my rodentia-filled childhood, it’s difficult to pick just one favorite memory, but here are a few of the ones that stand out:

1. Watching ‘The Price is Right’ when a mouse stumbled in front of the screen in what appeared to be a drunken stupor, came up on two legs, grabbed its heart, spinned around, and fell. It was one of the most theatrical performances I’ve ever seen and the most memorable segment of ‘Plinko.’

2. The time my dad caught a mouse with his bare hand that was running up the microwave cord while his four daughters and wife screamed in the background.

3. The time my sister set a glue-trap in her closet, forgot about it, then went into her closet a few hours later, barefoot, stepped on the glue-trap, which had a mouse glued to it, freaked out, screamed, and dislocated her ankle trying to shake the glue-trap from her toe.

4. The time my sister (same sister) saw a mouse jump out of her toaster, and not an onion bagel, which is what usually jumps out of the toaster. My family now refers to toasters as ‘mousesters.’

5. When my mother was putting a 12-pound turkey in the oven and three mice popped their heads out of three separate stove burners; it was something like a whack-a-mole game.

6. Doing my physics homework at the kitchen table when my dad’s friend smashed a mouse with a pancake griddle.