A Better Way to Set a Mousetrap (a multi-part post)

Introduction
Notice: This is a public service blog entry, and won't be particularly interesting to anyone who doesn't need to know how to set a rat trap -- but for those who do, it should be very helpful!

Some of my regular readers may remember my ongoing issues with vectors. By vectors, I mean of course rats, everyone's favorite vector! My mother was nice enough to give me a copy of Rats for my birthday, a marvelous book full of fascinating natural history and regular history on rats.

In my last blog entry on this subject, I mentioned that I was very impressed with the level of service delivered by Multnomah County Health Department's Vector Control staff. They have a lot of free information about rats. Not only that, if you have rats, they show up at your house, bearing lots of traps, bait, advice, lore and hands-on assistance. As I said before, this is a great return on your tax dollar, one that even a libertarian can (or should) get behind.

I was especially especially impressed with their innovative advice over the phone on how to set a trap using the boot method (described in great detail shortly). I was also surprised at how little good information I found on the web on how to set a trap -- setting a trap is scary! You could lose a finger! It was one of the things I dreaded most about having rats (this was before I felt the full financial impact of them -- approximately $7,000, including new stove, sewer repairs, and other misc. costs). I expected to see detailed pictorials on how to set a trap on sites like the Victor site (major manufacturer of rat traps -- but I didn't. (At Victor, I found some annoying popups and no good pictures at all -- so be warned.)

The first time around, with the Thanksgiving Rat, I got advice over the phone about how to set the trap. The second time around, when I had a colony, horde, mischief, pack, plague, or swarm of rats (thanks to this site for the collective nouns) coming up through my yard from a hole in my sewer line, the good Multnomah county Vector people came to my house in the person of Fred Allen.

I blogged about these experiences and, in due time (google and blogs being what they are), marysgreatideas.com turned up as the number 1 google hit for the phrase "how to set a rat trap" (granted, there aren't that many hits to begin with, but technically speaking, I'm hits 1-5 out of 10, if you click on the thing that shows the omitted redundent hits). That made me feel kind of bad, considering how little substantial advice I gave on such an important topic.

So, in the interest of doing the right thing on the interweb, I'm posting this multi-part pictorial on how to set a rat trap (or how to set a mouse trap -- same method, only cuter!) using the two techniques I learned from Fred Allen and Jim Stafford of Multnomah County Health Department: the butterknife method and the boot method. Fred Allen was kind enough to let me photograph him in action. (I should add that he is much cuter than these photographs make him appear. I made a faux pois when he mentioned that he didn't find the pictures very flattering, and I responded, "you look great in them!" instead of the correct response when someone expresses disappointment in their appearance in a photo which is, "you look much cuter in real life.")

DISCLAIMER: None of this material has been proofed or approved in any way by Multnomah County people and I only vaguely know what I'm doing. If you break a finger using any of these methods, or some other hybrid method you dream up, it's your own fault. That having been said, these methods have worked well for me even when I was totally drunk. I don't recommend setting rat traps while drunk, but I suspect I'm not the first to do so.

And with that -- on to the rat trapping!