Yeah, what the fuck? Their decision to let the cat play with the mouse over an entire day startled me when I first read it, and then bringing it up again later in the article as one of the only solutions for dealing with a mouse really threw me out of the article.

It's hard to tell ahead of time. When I was a kid, our cat would immediately chew the head off mice.

We lived in a cottage. During the winter, when there were mice in the house, you might hear one rustling around the grill (I think that's a broiler to Americans) of the electric cooker, eating crumbs and whatnot. The easiest way to catch these mice was to put the cat up on the counter then rattle the grill pan around until the mouse jumped out, whereupon the cat pounced.

My sympathy for the mice was limited. Finding mouse droppings in your breakfast cereal, your bread nibbled into, footprints across your butter, etc. gets old pretty quickly, and we were poor. The nearest shop was 2 miles away, and we couldn't afford a car. Mouse traps didn't catch all the mice.

I'm perfectly fine with letting cats take care of mouse infestations, but it sounds like the humans caught the mouse, and then gave it to the cat to play with like a toy:

> Strategies were formed. Glue traps were laid. Bait was provisioned. And then, surely enough, the mouse was caught.

> Having caught the mouse, the question became what to do about it. Due to the host of frustrations and problems that the mouse had caused for the inhabitants of the house, everyone agreed on a solution: let the cat handle it. And so, for what seemed like an eternity, the cat went to work on the mouse, slowly torturing it limb-by-limb. This went on for at least a day, probably longer.