Life's nice for mice - and there's more of them - now the cats are too fat and lazy to catch them



You'd think the only place where mice run rings around cats is on children’s TV.

But these days, it seems the Tom And Jerry story is closer to fact than fiction.

For pampering is making our cats fatter and more unfit. And just like Jerry, the rodent in the popular cartoons, the mice are taking advantage.

Lacking in energy: Pampering is making our cats fatter and more unfit, which is great news for mice



Rodent infestations are soaring in the UK. Last year, Rentokil noted a 36 per cent rise in callouts – and a 26 per cent increase the previous year.

Wet summers are said to be driving mice indoors – and middle-class householders make the situation worse because they are too embarrassed to report infestations.

But cats should also take some of the blame, experts say.

In the last 20 years, the number of obese cats has doubled. Out of the nine million we keep as pets, a third are overweight.

Apart from the health problems this causes, the extra pounds also make the animals listless and lacking in energy – leaving them too unfit to hunt.

Savvas Othon, technical director for Rentokil, explained the problem. ‘Mice are satellite feeders – they feed from a lot of points during the night. They will happily live in a house with a cat.

‘If cats are too well fed they have no impetus to catch a mouse.’

But good mousers appear to be more in need than ever.







He added: ‘We are getting more calls about rodents in general which usually spend the summer outdoors but were driven indoors by the wet summers of the last two years.

‘They have also benefited from the increase in food waste on the streets, and poor standards of hygiene in the home.’

However, it’s a myth that mice like dirty homes. They are happy to live in clean houses, as long as there are a few crumbs around. They need just 3g of food a day to survive.

Keeping quiet about an infestation instead of tackling it could lead to real problems.

A pair of mice can produce up to 120 young a year. Each one can breed by the age of 12 weeks. Within a few months, a home can have hundreds or even thousands of rodents scampering around.

‘In a row of terraced houses, usually the floors run all the way through the terrace as do the attics and that’s a great place for them to travel.

‘If you have mice, the chances are your neighbour has them too,’ he added.



‘When I was a pest control technician I had a van and I went to my mum’s for lunch, she asked me to park the van round the corner. That stigma still persists today.’

The office worker’s culture of eating at their desks has helped the spread of mice too.

Pest controllers are getting a growing number of calls to deal with infestations in the workplace.

Most householders know if they have mice. Aside from the telltale scampering noises, they leave tiny black droppings on floors and work surfaces.

