Winter's Tail End and the Mouse Saga pt.2

Winter's death grip is finally loosening. Though we woke up to snow this morning, the temperature has quickly risen from face-and-nostril-stinging to can-go-out-in-a-jumper-and-be-perfectly-comfortable. It already feels like a small weight has been lifted from the shoulders.

Update on the fireplace-mystery-visitor. My dad came over this afternoon with his inspection mirror and various tools to prod around. We removed the foil tape covering the flue and discovered a whole bunch of old newspaper packed into the cavity. When we removed that, out came a whole mess of mouse scat followed by a bundle of fur and miscellany, like chewed up paper and dried grass - clearly someone's humble abode. They picked a good spot anyway - no hawks, cats, or snakes would be getting them from in there.

The landlord joined us to assess the situation and decide what to do. My suggestion was to get a small double-door cage type trap to place either on the sort of shelf of the cavity up in the chimney, or down on the ground of the hearth which we would block off from the living room with the panel I use for stretching paper. Much to my dismay, he didn't like that idea, and instead took a trip up the road to the hardware store. He returned with a small arsenal of wretched traps - mainly two trays full of some ridiculously sticky substance, and two clamp traps. I made an uncomfortable attempt at talking him out of these and into something else but it wasn't any use; he's the type of person who sticks to a thing once his mind is set on it.

So now I'm sitting in my studio, which is also the living room, awaiting either the sound of a clamp snapping shut or the creature screaming as it tries to get out of the wretched sticky shit. I don't want to be here at all. The landlord will be back in a few hours tonight to check the traps, and again tomorrow morning. I want to remove everything at once and try something else - but I also don't want to piss off the landlord (who is also my uncle, and lives just upstairs) even more than he is at having a mouse in his house. The tension between my moral code (don't hurt anything, not even spiders or ants) and the need to maintain a good relationship with family / landlord is terrible. Thus my desire to flee from the situation altogether (out of sight out of mind, right?)

Last year we had a rat burrowing in the flowerbed beneath our porch. He was going to put rat poison out but I managed to talk him out of that (there are far far too many stray cats, dogs, pets that get loose, birds, raccoons, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, coyotes, wildlife in general in our neighborhood- anything at all could get into it and would suffer horribly) and into one of the door-closing cage traps. I asked him to let me know when he caught it, so I could take it down into the valley and release it, far away from the house and into the woods. To my dismay, when he did catch it, he filled a barrel of water in the back garden and shoved the cage, rat and all, into it for half a day. I didn't talk to him for two weeks afterwards (but never did tell him why).

I feel an incredible moral duty to remove the traps.
The sticky ones sound particularly bad. At least the snappy ones would, at best, be quick...to think of the thing suffering and struggling in that goo...(although I wonder whether there'd be some way for me to help the creature out should it fall victim to it...)
But at the same time I feel obliged to listen to the 'rules' of the person who owns the house.
At the price of a living creature's life though? ("Oh but it's just a mouse.") That guilt will weigh heavier on me than any winter day.

Stay tuned.

Edit: Moral compass wins. The shop has a catch-and-release trap specifically for mice that's small enough for the hearth. I hope the landlord doesn't get upset - I can't imagine why he would other than he spent $10 on his cruel traps - but, well, I won't budge of he does.