Poor wittle dead meadow vole

I didn't really want the poor little thing dead. Unfortunately, most small rodents like mice and voles can carry the Hantavirus.  This can be deadly in some cases.

Ironically the maintenance guy who disposed of the vole and cleaned my tray with disinfectant, also tossed the contents of my tray by just dumping it in the garbage. Never a good idea. They suggest to wash and wet everything so it doesn't become air born.

I really hope that my exposure won't make me sick. The entire contents of my drawer has been exposed to voles. I just cleaned my top one with Lysol wipes. I didn't clean the other 2 yet, I will tomorrow.

I had no idea that rodents could be so deadly. Of course the risk of me having unwanted rodents in my house with the 4 cats is limited. But in a large building like at work, it's not unusual for it to be full of rodents.

Rodent dead finally

They brought me 2 new glue traps and 2 regular mouse traps yesterday after I discovered that the 'mouse' had been stuck in the glue trap over the week-end but had managed to escape since Monday morning all I found was droppings and lots of fur in the glue.

This morning there was a body in my drawer. I would call it a "field mouse" but it's probably a meadow vole. Some kind soul in maintenance disposed of the body after I called them. 

A co-worker asked me how I can live with myself killing an animal when I'm vegetarian. No one likes to have droppings of any animals in their drawer. Seriously.

Mice droppings

One of the weirder things that happened to me today is that I opened my desk drawer at work to find some sticky tabs and noticed I have all these pistachios. I didn't remember having pistachios in my top desk drawer. Then upon further examination I realize they are just empty shells. That's when I realized that I also had mouse droppings.

So the company has mice and one in the past month has been going into my top drawer to peacefully eat pistachios.  Once I removed all the papers and clips that I keep in there, you could see lots of mouse droppings.  This is what the mouse left in my drawer tray: