i continue to find minimal evidence of it in the apartment, but it is a mouse in here. i can hear it squeaking.
is it the same mouse that left me presents last year? i don't know.
it's making me sad that it keeps coming in here. frankly, if it stayed in the walls and ate the bugs, i would not care much. it must be eating the bugs; it's not eating my food. i am pretty clean, but i find crumbs a day or two later. i have seen little to no sign of roaches in here. so why does it come in here if there's no food for it to eat?
it must be coming in because it's warm, and as a result it seems to see me as a caretaker or a benevolent master, and i'm not. it seems to actually be following me around through the walls. i've started banging on the walls to scare it off and the squeak is shifting from a happy squeak to a sad squeak, as though it gets it and is sad at the rejection. i'm going to have to kill it if it keeps at it, even if i don't want to.
rodents are a difficult moral problem. these are smart animals that pose a threat to our health and need to be exterminated but they might be good pets or companions, otherwise.
it's not destructive and it leaves almost no feces. almost is not good enough. we've coexisted for centuries. i wish there was a better solution.
i've made it very hard to get in here and it's kept the rats out, which was the intent. but this very small mouse is something like 10% of the size of the large rats that were in the ceiling last year and the things i did to keep the rats out and worked have not been enough to keep the little mouse out. it can live in the walls; the rats couldn't. it's substantively harder to block any holes it might use to get in because it's so much smaller.
i'm figuring it out and i will but if it keeps finding alternative ways to get in after i block the existing entrance points then it will have to die.