The ethics of killing mice

January 5, 5:48 PMDC Ethical Issues ExaminerLaura Harrison McBride

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Cute, but potential deadly

It’s about time for a lighter note, yes?

While cleaning up my kitchen after breakfast this morning, I noted that the mouse invasion had returned. After having new gas service installed a year ago, we had some mice. The installers didn’t seal up the entrance very well, and when cold weather came along, so did the rodents. We set traps (and caught mice, eeewww!) and we thought we had sealed up the hole into the house. Apparently not.

Mice are cute; most kids think so, as long as those mice are doing funny things in cartoons. Most adults seem to think so, too. I think so. They really are cute. But their very cuteness makes them problematical for some of us. We loathe killing them, we loathe setting traps. Not to mention, we loathe dealing with the carcass in the morning.

So why kill them?  If I were a Hindu, I wouldn’t kill them. I wouldn’t kill anything, not even spiders. (I kill spiders and flies with nary a second thought.)

But ethical possibilities do arise. For instance:

• Just because I’m not Hindu, is there still an ethical problem with killing them?
• Is killing justified when the stakes are high enough? What are the stakes involved in sharing lodgings with mice?
• Where does regard for living things begin and end?
• Am I justified in taking the life of a cute little mouse because he annoys me with his droppings?
• Is the health and well-being of a human of a higher order than the health and well-being of a rodent?
• Is it simply a matter of economics, that is, I’m busy making money to buy the food that feeds him (well, the crumbs and garbage parts, anyway) and he is giving nothing in return, except a minor amount of cuteness (my dog is cuter) and what else?

I decided to seek input. I didn’t seek input, however, from a saddhu. I entered “mouse disease vector” on Google to see what I could see.

Yipes!  Three people died in Colorado in December from hantavirus, a virulent mouse-borne disease. I had heard of this, years ago, and thought it was, well, sort of gone.  It’s not.

For many clicks, all I could find was stuff about hantavirus. Surely the mouse was a vector for more than that, or else why would Lowe’s stock arsenals of mouse killing devices and substances?

Finally, I found this:

The house mouse is the most troublesome, and economically important rodent in the United States. Except for the spread of food poisoning, house mice are not as important as rats as carriers of disease. However, mice can transmit diseases such as salmonellosis, meningitis, leptospirosis, rat-bite fever, ringworm, and dermatitis. Mice can transmit diseases by contaminating food with their urine, and feces. The house mouse produces about 70 droppings per day.

I think I have solved my ethical dilemma. I have about an hour before dinner, and it’s only ten minutes to my local hardware store.