The darnedest thing!

I came home after my last class - I have no more office hours today and I had a slight headache so I thought I'd eat a leisurely lunch, maybe practice piano a bit, and then decide whether to go back to campus to type my exam (it's easier to do that over there; some of the formatting I need to do is harder with my laptop keyboard)

After I got home, I went into the bathroom. Was ready to use the toilet.

There was what was either a largish mouse, or a small young rat in the toilet.

I am not, by my nature, the shrink-and-scream kind of girl. (Which is probably good, seeing as I wind up usually dealing with these kinds of things on my own). I stood there for a moment looking at it, going "How on earth did this happen?" (I was more puzzled by the fact of a mouse in the bog than I was frightened)

(They are working on the sewer lines down the street from me; perhaps the populations of critters that inhabit it have been disturbed. I guess I should be grateful it was not an alligator...)

I figured the only thing that could have happened was that it came up the drainpipe from the street (not a very long length), swam through the p-trap, and found itself in the toilet bowl. It was soaked and shaking.

I realized I had to get it out of there or else I couldn't use the toilet.

One option would be to flush and try to send it back the way it came, but I didn't, because (a) that seemed spectacularly inhumane, even to do to a disease-spreading vermin and (b) as I am not absolutely 100% certain that's how the mouse (I am preferring to think of it as a mouse, not a rat) got there, I figured it might not fit, and then I'd be faced with calling the guys at Blackburn out to come fish a drowned mouse out of my toilet drain.

So, I figured: if I can scoop it into the trashcan, I can dump it outside.

I donned the heavy rubber gloves I use for caustic cleaning - not that I was going to try to pick it up, but if it went rogue and tried to bite me, at least I'd be a bit protected. And I got a strainer from the kitchen (which will now be soaked in bleach before I use it again).

And I scooped it up. It was not that hard; it squeaked at me at first (which kind of made me go "awww" even though it is a disease-spreading vermin) but then climbed up on the strainer and let me dump it into the bathroom trashcan.

See:



And I took it outside and dumped it out at the end of the yard. I figured either it would find its way back to where it came from (and hopefully never return, after that experience), or it would become part of the cycle of life when a hawk or something found it, or it would just expire on its own - but at least it would be expiring out in the sun and the fresh air, instead of inside my commode.

I really can't quite believe it swam up through the pipes into the toilet - I thought such a thing was impossible, somehow - aren't there some kind of one-way valves in things? Or is that just in newer plumbing? But I'm forced to conclude that that's the most plausible way it got in. For one thing: I've been watching very closely for any sort of "mouse sign" - having had mice in past falls, I'm on the alert - and haven't seen any, so I have no evidence that they're in my house. And second, it seems bizarre that a mouse would get in, bypassing the much more pleasant and fragrant things it could go to (wool, and old books, and that box of butter cookies on my dining room table that I don't have entirely closed) rather than climbing the steep, slippery side of the commode, squeezing between the rim and seat, and plopping down in the water. (And that said - there are easier sources of water to find, if that's what it was seeking).

So I don't know. One of the stranger things I've seen of late.

I will say this seems to me to be another good piece of evidence in favor of the "seat down, lid closed" default position for the toilet. (Those of you ladies who share a house with a gent, who have argued about this: you're welcome to use my story as evidence in support of the seat-down, lid-closed position.)


(ETA: I am not crazy. It apparently is possible under certain circumstances. From the "Straight Dope" website:

you do have a problem if your john is at ground level or in the basement--that is, where the soil pipe runs horizontally or at a very shallow angle to the sewer. Rats are good underwater swimmers, and it's no problem--believe it or not, they actually have movies of this--for rats to stroll along a horizontal soil pipe from the sewer, swim through the water-filled piping inside the toilet, and emerge in the toilet bowl.

Yes to ground level. Yes to shallow soilpipe angle (I am better acquainted with my house's plumbing than I'd like to be, after the Tree Root Clog incident of this past spring)

Again: Lid stays closed in the future. If I ever have another one entering this way, I don't want it to actually get out into the house.