Anti-Mouse Stilts

He's in there. You can here him. A scurry across the counter, scratching on the cupboard door, the horrible, horrible sound of chewing. The turds you can handle--a paper towel and a bottle of disinfectant spray take care of that. The noises you can ignore--turn the volume on the TV up one notch. But the thought of one of these dirty little rodents touching you, running across your foot, up your leg--this is horror in its deepest form. Sadly, now that you know there are mice in the kitchen, you will starve to death because you refuse to enter the kitchen as long as the possibility of coming into contact with a mouse remains.

Too bad you didn't buy any mouse stilts the last time you were at K-Mart! If you had, you could calmly step onto the stilts and prance about the kitchen without the fear of touching vermin of any sort.

"But mice can climb up things like stilts," protests the skeptic. Not if the stilts are made out of a smooth, round pipe (tipped with rubber for manageability) and fitted with a rodent-frustrating plastic bell just beneath the foot (similar to those placed over bird feeders to keep squirrels out). The mouth of the bell faces down so that any mouse attempting an attack will be deflected back down to the ground.

"Why not buy a mousetrap?" asks the pragmatist. The mouse is a living being, too! We don't want the poor thing to die--we just don't want it to touch us. Ever. This way, we can live peaceably--separate but equal.