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Mice. Oh so cute. If only they didn’t leave their little evidence everywhere. Last year, a little mouse got into my apartment. I heard some chewing in the walls at night for quite a while but couldn’t figure out exactly where it was coming from. I went out of town for a weekend, and when I came home I saw little pieces of cat food on the kitchen floor. This was very curious, considering that I do not have a cat.

What had happened was that this little mouse had chewed through the wall in my pantry while I was gone and went straight for the emergency bag of cat food I keep on hand for when I find strays. I quickly cleaned up the little mess that he had made, and I searched for the point of entry. I found his little escape route and I plugged up the hole with some steel wool. I then proceeded to clean my whole kitchen with peppermint-scented soap and essential peppermint oil (mice are not fans of peppermint!).

Thinking that I had dealt with this issue, I went to sleep right after baking some vegan apple-raisin muffins—leaving the muffins out on the counter to cool. I woke up in the morning, ready to have a muffin for breakfast, and—all the muffin tops had been eaten! This was so cute and so frustrating all at the same time―all I could think of were his tiny little hands holding the crumbs and chewing incessantly on the treasure that he had discovered as I slept.

If you build it, they will come, and things can get a bit exasperating if you don’t solve the problem completely. Over the next couple of days, I did a thorough check of my whole apartment and found two more holes that he was using to go in and out. I sealed those up, and things have been mouse-free ever since.

In the event that a little mouse or several mice find their way inside your home, check out our humane tips for making your house mouse-proof.

Cruel methods are never necessary―please also take a moment to ask Lowe’s to stop selling glue traps.

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Last night, I got sucked into watching a few documentaries with overly dramatic titles about insects. I sat in awe for nearly three hours watching ants raise caterpillar larvae as their own, spiders weave thick squares of web to use in a tool-like fashion to capture their prey from the rain-forest floor, and mayflies and cicadas as they shed their skin and emerged from the water and dark underground to start the last and most brief part of their life.

Insects develop complex relationships, care for their young, and work as teams much as we do. When you see a spider or ant running across the floor, it’s likely that they have somewhere important to be in order to complete something that they set out to do that day, just as we run errands and have order in our daily lives. However, often when we see them, we treat their presence as an intrusion, and many people even resort to inhumane methods for dealing with these encounters.

Cockroaches probably bear the brunt of our negative reactions more heavily than most insects. While you certainly don’t want your living space to turn into a cockroach haven, there are humane and affordable methods for discouraging them. Inhumane poisons and traps will do nothing for long-term control and will have you spending more time and money than solving the problem once and for all in an effective and humane manner. With a little time, you can have your environment cockroach-free, and no one has to get hurt. The following is a strategy that I used a couple of years ago, and it worked perfectly.

First and foremost, you must work on prevention. Keep all dishes washed, take trash out frequently, and make sure that unrefrigerated companion animal food is tightly sealed and put away when your animal companion is not eating. Keep countertops wiped down with a vinegar-and-water solution, and sweep, mop, and vacuum regularly. Now for the actual cockroachproofing, you will need the following:

• Non-toxic white glue
• Caulking in either white or clear (available from hardware stores)
• Stoppers for all your drains that do not already have built-in stoppers
• Dried whole bay leaves

Start with one room at a time, and begin with places where you have seen cockroaches. Put stoppers in all your drains—sinks and bathtub―when not in use to prevent roaches from coming in via your drainpipes. Also be sure to repair leaky faucets and pipes, as roaches are attracted to water.

Seal up all gaps between floorboards, under counters, around sink plumbing and windowsills, and near fuse boxes. For larger gaps, use the caulking, and for smaller gaps, use the glue. This will take some time, but if you just work on it for a little while each day, you will have it finished in no time.

Add dried bay leaves to your kitchen drawers and cabinets, too, as they are a great natural repellent and will leave your kitchen smelling wonderful!

P.S. If after your cockroachproofing you find any little guys who got stuck inside, help them out and use something like this to humanely remove them from your living space. Click here for more tips too.