The vermin poll.

[rivka]

[Poll #1243857]

What prompted this poll: we saw a mouse in our kitchen this weekend. Mice in our last house got a bit out of control, so we're being alert and taking immediate measures to try to get rid of this one. But although I know that mice can carry disease, I don't really freak out about them. They seem like a normal fact of household life to me. They're a pain, but they don't revolt me.

Then I remembered a post I saw once on mothering.com, which at the time I labeled one of the most unintentionally revealing posts I'd ever seen. It was someone posing a hypothetical situation in which Child Protective Services might make unfair negative judgments about a family: By the time the caseworker shows up Mom decides to be friendly because, of course, she has nothing to hide -- so she invites the worker in for a cup of tea. She pours the tea and they sit chatting ... a moment later the worker picks up her cup to see a roach floating in it.

Mom says, "I'm so sorry -- we've just treated for roaches, but you know how hard it is to get completely rid of them ..." The worker doesn't understand, she's always lived in newer homes: from her perspective, a roach is a sign of a filthy house ...

My first reaction to that post: My house is 168 years old, so I hardly think I'm biased. Serving someone tea in a cup that has a roach in it? Is, in fact, a sign of a filthy house. And if you think that's normal or understandable, there's something wrong with your housekeeping standards. My second reaction, though: Huh, probably there are people out there who would feel the same way about mouse droppings in the back of a kitchen cupboard, which to me is a sign of whoops-but-no-big-deal.

Your thoughts?

Comments

[fairoriana.livejournal.com]

I feel a bit more strongly about miller moths because I've had lots of trouble with them, and the GET IN THE FOOD. There's nothing like going to make your pasta for company dinner and finding it stringy with a web and completely disgusting. If someone was "eh, no big deal" I'd want to let them know that it is an issue they should try to address sooner than later, if possible, lest they also discover that all their cake mix has become a home to invertabrates.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Ah. That's not what I thought miller moths were, I thought they were the kind that ate your clothes.

Please revise my reaction to ZOMG.

I haven't had these. I've had the other kind.

[naomikritzer]

1. Mice: "Huh. I'll keep an eye out for a present from my mouser." The cat who kills mice has taken care of every mouse within 24 hours but once presented it to me still twitching.

2. Cockroaches in someone else's house: I would be shocked in Minneapolis, but this is a regional issue. My mother is an impeccable housekeeper but did not want to use poison when she had young kids, and when we lived in Houston, we had the Texan tree roaches despite her best efforts. (That said, a roach in a teacup served to a guest? ZOMG.)

3. Miller moths in someone else's house: Are these flour moths? I would warn them about the possibility of serious infestation (I had a massive pantry moth infestation one time) and suggest pheremone traps from www.bugspray.com. (If these aren't flour moths, I wouldn't even notice.)

4. The other vermin in my parents' house: wasps. We had wasps that would build nests behind our shutters, and despite my mother's aversion to poisonous sprays, I don't understand why they didn't take measures to get rid of them. I got wasps in my bedroom on a regular basis and was stung many, many times.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Miller moths and flour moths do seem to be the same thing; they are also apparently called meal moths, pantry moths, and grain moths. We had an infestation in one of the group houses I lived in during college, and only after that did I realize why my mother freaked out so much when she saw one stray one in our family's kitchen.

It would be nice if we could keep a cat, but Michael and I both have allergies.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing about this poll to me is the distinction between "eh, no big deal" and "time to take pest-control measures". To me, the answer would usually be both; as in, it's no big deal to have to take pest-control measures, it's part of the regular upkeep of a dwelling unless you happen to live in an insanely lucky climate.

With regards to roaches; if you live in the south, you will have the occasional roach. Although this is not the way my gut reaction goes: if it's enormous, things are okay. An adult roach has wandered in somehow. If you start seeing little roaches, that's when you're fucked, because you've now got them living in your house and breeding.

And if you treat for roaches, of course, that's when they come out to die. Not that I wouldn't freak the hell out and all, but I could see that happening; especially if your housekeeping is good enough that you don't automatically check dishes as you take them out to make sure there's not crud on them, because your dishes can be assumed to be clean.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

The interesting thing about this poll to me is the distinction between "eh, no big deal" and "time to take pest-control measures". To me, the answer would usually be both; as in, it's no big deal to have to take pest-control measures, it's part of the regular upkeep of a dwelling unless you happen to live in an insanely lucky climate.

Well, for example: we occasionally see stray tiny little ants in the playroom, which opens up onto our garden. If there aren't a lot of them, and they don't seem to be going after something in particular, I just keep my eye out. I figure they wandered in from outside and will wander back out again, and that's usually what happens. That's how I feel about the occasional housefly too. I wouldn't rush out to get poison spray. But if I had ants in the pantry, or a housefly problem, then I would take steps.

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I chose "other" for my reaction to someone with mice or cockroaches because it wouldn't affect my overall judgment of them, or even them as housekeepers, but I do feel that in both cases (1) if you see one, there are probably many more, and (2) it's much easier to eliminate them when there are fewer, so (3) on a purely practical basis, acting earlier is much better than acting later. I'd give that as advice, but not judge them if they chose a different approach.

Come to think, we did have occasional roaches in North Carolina, but those were the huge southern flying roaches--scary and upsetting, but they bred outside, so it was more like a grasshopper wandering in (but yuckier) than an incipient infestation.

[timill]

When I find a mouse, I generally look for the cat that brought it in...

The others are mostly N/A, since I currently live in a rural part of the UK.

Next year, however, we should have moved to Tennessee...

[rivka.livejournal.com]

The others are mostly N/A, since I currently live in a rural part of the UK.

*blink* Really? Whoa. Any household pests that do become an issue, where you live?

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Older houses (our house and most of our neighborhood date to 1850 +/-), you are going to have Things. Bats, wasps, squirrels, sometimes rats added to your poll ingredients.

One thing we don't have, "other" in the poll, is cockroaches. They don't live this far north, so we'd nab a specimen and hand it over to the Bug Guy who works with Wife's nature center.

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

We don't have roaches, but we do have a lot of spiders and centipedes, especially in the basement where our bathroom is.

If something happens to the spiders we see a huge increase in flying bugs, so we tend to leave them alone. And the centipedes (which we only see very occasionally) keep the number of spiders from getting out of control.

[Edited to add] You know, housekeeping standards aside, I can't imagine how somebody can not notice there's a roach in a cup.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

I didn't even *think* to mention the spiders. Just part of life. Like you, we have a symbiotic relationship with them.

[tassie-gal.livejournal.com]

Where I live now the only roaches I have EVER seen are my Giant Burrowing ones (Marcopanethsia sp) which live in a habitat on my dresser. Never had pantry moths down here, and its too cold for mice I suspect. Ants however seem to like my cupboards and I dont like them...so we wage war.
However when I lived in Brisbane we had big roaches on a semi regular basis - Periplantia sp, which are technically outside roaches, so dont make me go ick. GERMAN roaches however (Blattica germanica) make me squirm big time and go into hyper OCD cleaning mode if I see them - dunno why, something about them makes me squirm. And if I seem over knowing on the roach front my honours thesis was on the diversity of oxyurid parasites in cockroaches, so I spent a whole year, dissecting and identifing the little blighters.

In other ppls houses, roaches make me go ICK, if I see a mouse I will freak, but otherwise Eh.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

In my childhood home, we had mice, but we knew where they came from - two of my brother's pet mice had escaped and occasionally emerged to sit beneath the TV set and mock us.

We now (in Georgia, 1920s house) have both roaches and ants. Previously when I've had ants I would set out ant baits and that would solve the problem very quickly. Here the ants seem to laugh at ant baits. The roaches are the giant 2-inch variety. We've been told that if you treat for roaches, you get ants, and if you treat for ants, it does nothing to stop roaches. Since we had a negative experience with roach treatments at our old house (left poison debris everywhere despite being told we had small children) for now we're just dealing. I want to look into boric acid for the ants, as I am told it's non-toxic to humans and I think we've found where they are getting into the house.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

I haven't tried to entirely eliminate ants, but discouraging them enough seems to keep them out of sight: when I find an ant trail on a counter, I clean that area thoroughly, remove the food that appears to be their goal, and maybe (depending on my mood) spray the nearer corners with generic crawling-bug spray ... but the only time I've seen a major occupying force has been when they've gone after Perrine's food, or (when anniemal visits) the food set out for Jamie (her poodle). I tried putting the cat dish inside a larger dish filled with water to make an ant-proof moat, but just putting a ring of ground black pepper on the floor surrounding her dish turned out to be just as effective and less hassle (despite looking much more slovenly). When they don't have access to what they want, I don't see them at all.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I very seldom see a live mouse, though I get the occasional half mouse left by one of the resident cats as a gift to the humans. When I have seen live mice, they've always been alive because the cats were still playing with them.

We get ants after a hard rain. They'll come up the wall and in the windows. We then engage in chemical warfare against them, and they go away until the next time there's a hard rain. Roaches have never been a problem out here, I suspect because we aren't tied into a public sewer system. We did have roaches that came up through the kitchen drain when we lived in Parkville, and I know they're a common problem in the Baltimore area. We used a lot of roach spray back then.

I have no idea about miller moths. The general rule with insects is that if we see them we spray.

When I was growing up the vermin varied with location. In Detroit we had mice once in a while. I don't recall ever seeing a live one, though my grandmother would throw out a dead one that got into a trap every few days. She kept a lot of mousetraps baited and distributed around the house. Ants were a seasonal problem, though they didn't get into the house all that often. I never saw a cockroach until we moved to Tucson, where they were all over the place. The much more serious issue in Tucson was the scorpions.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

i have no idea what miller moths are. mice need to be invited to leave. i have them in my garage and sometimes on my back porch (where i feed the dogs).

cockroaches need to be eradicated. through burning the house down, if necessary. and then moving. to alaska.

(there's a reason i live north of the hard frost line.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Miller moths are little brown moths about 1/4" long. They like to get into open packages of flour, cornmeal, crackers, pasta, etc., and lay eggs which hatch into disgusting little worms.

They were a problem when I lived in the Northwest, but I've never seen any here.

I'm with you on the cockroaches.

[kcobweb.livejournal.com]

We have mice. Period. We live next to fields and lots of open space and I don't think we'll ever completely get rid of them. Mostly, we haven't done much about it yet (except change some of our food storage methods). But we are talking about getting a cat, and it will be a good incentive to do so.

My mother certainly thinks I'm more lackadaisical than I need to be, I think. But whatever. I'm not jazzed about lots of traps and stuff, so .... whatever. :)

We also have ants. When they start increasing in numbers, I just buy under package of ant traps and stick them under the furniture in the room in question. No big deal. Apparently ants were a problem for the last owners of our house too.

I've never lived in the south, so I've never had roaches. I have a strong reaction to the idea, but I think that's partly my unfamiliarity.

I think I was thinking that Miller moths were something else - the description above is icky.

**********************

When Elena gets older, we will definitely have to be strict about no food in your bedroom and that kind of thing. Because that would develop into disaster, I suspect.

[electricland.livejournal.com]

I had mice this spring (I learned about this by finding one curled up dead in the supplementary dog food bag). My response was: 1. OH HELL NO, and traps; 2. Do not buy more dog food than will fit in the plastic tub. The traps worked fine; I caught 3 mice and I haven't seen any more.

This was in the city, mind you. At the cottage we are resigned to finding mouse poop all over everything when we come up for the first time in the spring. We just clean everything and don't worry about it. They don't seem to hang around in the summer.

And I'm happy to say I've only had glancing encounters with cockroaches. YICK.

We will not speak of the occasional raccoon problems. ;)

I lived in Kenya as a child and in the rainy season we would be inundated with winged ants (termites). They would crawl into our house through any opening and shed their wings and it was vile, but there wasn't much you could do about it (well, sitting in the dark so they wouldn't come towards the light was helpful, but only a bit). It only lasted a couple of days.

[wiredferret.livejournal.com]

Eat 'em! In Zaire, it was like protein-candy on the wing.

When I was a little girl, we used to eat our oatmeal out of barrels that had a DDT-soaked rag affixed to the lid. It amazes me this has not had more consequences.

Now, I've mostly lived in apartments, so there's not a lot of vermin. We had one mouse that we rescued from the cat, and we had ferrets, which will keep out any fur-bearing vermin, although the nature of the ferrets themselves.... Once in a while, I'll get pantry moths, which is GWOSS, and I do a sweep. Usually it's a bad batch of flour.

[spiritdancer]

My response re: the mice? Good grief, look what the cat(s) dragged in, again :-)

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

I react a bit more strongly to roaches than to the others because they seem to be more difficult to get rid of. I don't have a ZOMG reaction to any of them because I've had all of them apart from roaches in houses that I've lived in (plus rats and woodworm), and the Army camp where I used to socialise as a teenager had roaches in the kitchens. All of them were dealt with without causing any serious problems. So I figure all of these things can happen to just about anyone, and with proper vigilance, control measures (for serious cases) and hygiene precautions, are more of an inconvenience than a serious health risk.

[therealocelot.livejournal.com]

The house itself definitely has an influence. The house I grew up in didn't have any pest problems that I remember - maybe an occasional cockroach. I really think this was largely climate/geography related more than cleanliness. I mean, you walk around outside at night there and you don't see cockroaches. You walk around here, and you do.

I've never had a mouse in the house before moving here (where we have a lot of open space around us), and we've lived in much worse cleanliness conditions in the past. So, we set traps, and try to make the kitchen less appealing (all food stored in chew-proof containers, that sort of thing).

Ants are endemic here, even in the brand new houses. All you can do is set bait - even if you're perfect about food they'll come in after water this time of year.

That said, if CPS was over, I'd make damn sure there was no roach in the cup/tea/water before serving it, though perhaps it fell in afterwards.

And I have no experience with Miller moths (and didn't know for sure how to tell if we had them or not until reading comments), despite having problems with the other three here.

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

There's a difference between vermin in the house -- sometimes unavoidable -- and vermin in the FOOD OMG.

We have ants when it starts raining every winter. My husband sprays poison and they go away. (Ant traps: not that effective.)

Miller moths are a pain in the ass and very, very easy to control. Put out a couple of these (any brand) and you're good to go. When you see more moths, replace the traps.

Mice ugh me out, and I would be vigorous -- okay, I'd hire somebody to be vigorous -- but I'd also suspect that I was doomed.

Rats require you to burn the house down. Sad but true.

[dglenn.livejournal.com]

We have rats here. Bold rats. Large rats. I judge how old they are by comparing them to my cat -- smaller than Perrine means they're not fully grown yet. I worry about the rats coming into the house.

Fortunately, so far, they haven't. I see rats on the sidewalk, but only mice indoors. *whew*

[(Anonymous)]

In our ~130 yr old brownstone in urban Boston, an occasional mouse passing through is common, esp in fall when it gets colder out. They don't get to stay (snap-traps are your friend), but don't cause ZOMG-ness. The story of the Christmas Mouse has in fact passed into family folklore. It wandered blithely out IN THE MIDDLE OF CHRISTMAS EVE DINNER and sat blinking in the center of the floor. My husband lobbed a champagne cork at it, whereupon it vanished under the dishwasher, never to be seen again (including in the traps we diligently placed for weeks afterward).

We've never had a roach. And a good thing, too. I'm with kalmn on the "house flambe'" school of roach management. Can't stand them, viscerally. Perhaps because they scuttle? [wanders off, shuddering...]

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

A roach is not a sign of a filthy house.

A roach in the teacup is a sign that the person serving tea wasn't paying attention.

The one time I found a mouse in my place, my first thought was, "How did you get in here?" I suspect that it slipped under the back door into my co-op, then entered my place because it was the only door that was left ajar.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

"A roach in the teacup is a sign that the person serving tea wasn't paying attention."

YES! Especially if they've had a roach problem in the recent past. You would think they would check for roaches, well, ALWAYS. 'Cuz, you know, roaches.

[tchemgrrl.livejournal.com]

I took the poll and read your comments after, and I'd like to add that the ZOMG reaction and judgmental-ness would increase the closer the critters are to food. Bathroom ants are just there for the warmth and moisture, kitchen ants are demons that must be immediately destroyed.

[selki.livejournal.com]

Is that an Awful Green Thing from Outer Space on your head?

I have cave crickets in my basement sometimes.

[redbird]

My "other" on mice is "let julian_tiger take care of it." We don't get a lot of mice on the top floor anyway, and the one that I know of since Julian's arrival I know of only because he proudly left the tail where we would see the evidence of his prowess.

The really odd bit is that we had cockroaches sometimes in the past, and haven't in years, despite not significantly changing our housekeeping routine. I'd guess that the exterminator is doing a good enough job with public areas and/or other people's apartments that there are none to slip into mine.

ETA: We've had flour moths in the past, but caught them early: before they grew wings or escaped the container. As far as I can tell, there were occasional instances when we bought flour containing moth eggs, perhaps because the bags weren't properly sealed before they reached us. The pest control measures (satisfactory so far) have been to immediately discard the flour and wash the container thoroughly.

[ruisseau.livejournal.com]

The other vermin that we occasionally have is fruit flies. They drive me crazy. I recently replaced the old composting container (the one that you fill on the counter then take out to the heap) with a double sealed container. It will likely help but they are persistent.

I suspect that part of it is that Kit doesn't run the friggin' disposal often enough. I, unfortunately, don't realize he hasn't until I smell it. *grumble*

[rivka.livejournal.com]

We have fruit flies in our offices. I don't even want to know what's attracting them. I kill two or three a day.

[ailbhe]

I've never seen a cockroach and only once lived somewhere with an ant problem - it was one of the first extremely hot summers Europe had in the last decade and it was in a filthy shared kitchen in London.

Growing up, we had no noticable vermin in the city and in the country we had occasional mice, resident shrews, and outdoor rats to varying degrees.

Headlice, now, headlice we had.

My main vermin problems now are headlice and fleas. There were rats coming into our garden from next door but that got sorted out. The cats bring mice in but none live with us.

I don't mind seeing animals. I hate, hate, hate seeing the droppings and not knowing where the animal is. I once got a mousedropping floating in my spoonful of o-shaped cereal, as a child; right in the middle of one of the os. *shudder*.

[ailbhe]

Oh, and in someone else's house, I say "Um, did you know you have [pest name]? I just saw [evidence] in the [location]." Most recently, mice, one running, garden - at a cafe :(

[nolly.livejournal.com]

Mice absolutely freak me out. Ants are a fact of life everywhere I've lived, pretty much; someone not even trying to get rid of them would bother me, but I've had invasions wherenothing I tried worked at all. Roaches and kitchen moths, my reaction would depend on how pervasive the invasion was, where (geographically) the home was, and whether it was being countered.

A roach floating in a teacuup is beyond the pale, whether they've had the exterminators in or not -- I don't want to drink bugs OR pesticide!

The previous owners of my condo left behind an ultrasonic pest repeller, and the only bugs I've had are a few spiders, things that clearly came in from outside with me (i.e. I opened the door to come in, and they flew at the light, or cool air, or whatever), and termites.

[tiger-spot.livejournal.com]

I note that in nearly all cases, my "pest control measures" consist of making sure whatever-it-is can't get at anything it might like to eat and (for vertebrates, centipedes, large spiders, etc.) removing the individual offender to the outdoors or (for roaches, ants, etc.) killing the little bastards. Also I take steps to block where it's getting in, if I can figure that out and it's blockable, and to find and remove any nests. I haven't ever had to use poison; I bought some for the persistent wasps on our balcony at the last place we lived, but we managed to catch all the nests when they were small enough that we could knock them down with soapy water and never had to actually use it.