Although we’ve been trying to deny it, we have a small mouse problem here on the farm. Although we live in a small city (it’s more of a town really with a population of around 1000 people) and there are houses all around us, most of the farms are “working farms” meaning that the people actually tend to fields in the area or do other work with their hands like woodworking or welding. To one side we have a carpenter, across the street is a welder and behind us is a farmer with a pretty major potato operation…

From our house, it’s about 5 minutes walk until you reach many agricultural fields. So it’s not really all that hard to imagine why we have mice around. After our first attempts at catching the little guys with mouse traps failed, we started thinking about getting a couple of mouser cats. But we’re not really sure if we’re ready to add more pets to our menagerie at the moment…and if that would further complicate things between Ayla and our current cats. The neighbors behind us with the potato farm have a couple of mousers running around and they do come into our yard at times. The previous owner of this house even built them a little ramp to get into the barn so they could patrol the area for him…along with trays of rat poison everywhere you looked.

We found one recently deceased mouse in the garden while we’ve been working back there this past week and it looks like the cats got to it…and Ayla also killed a mouse on Saturday, much to our surprise. She went into the mud/laundry room next to our kitchen and started pawing around under one of the shelves. When I went to investigate just what she was up to a few minutes later, the scene looked like this:

The little guy never really stood a chance. A few swipes from a Newfie paw and that must have been it for him. But we are rather pleased that we likely won’t be needing to get more pets at the moment…we just need to let Ayla loose in the mud room a bit more often 🙂