So, what you do is hold the mouse down by the back of the skull with two fingers and, using your other hand, pull their tail with a quick, decisive snap. It’s called cervical dislocation.
I mean, you have to really snap that tail though. No gloves. Better feel if you don’t use gloves because they’ll turn around and bite you if you aren’t careful.
You must be cruel to be kind because if you doubt yourself for half a second, if you hesitate, if you don’t pull hard enough, if you second guess the positioning of your fingers on their itty-bitty cranium, you will only wound them. Probably, you’ll break their back and cripple them and they will scrabble awkwardly on the table in front of you. Suffering.
At that point, the sick adrenaline roars through your body and your hands shake harder.
Trembling hands pinning the injured, struggling mouse down again for another go round.
Or you could do what I did the first time and start yelling for help.
Awful battle in my head. You have to be brutal or you hurt them. But you really don’t want to hurt them so you hesitate. Your heart’s not in it so you don’t pull hard enough. Such a dilemma.
It wasn’t my favorite thing to do.
And you’re calling me a monster? Well, fuck off. Fuck you!
Fuck you, especially, if you are a meat-eating, leather-wearing hypocrite.
Those mice served a higher purpose. A much higher purpose than ending up as floating brown shit in the city’s municipal sewer system.
Maybe you wanted that steak because you got a big ass raise and think you deserve it or maybe you went for the grilled chicken. (Grilled chicken is such a pussy thing to eat, by the way. If you order that in a decent restaurant, the chef knows you are a total pussy and so does the waiter.)
Whatever. Hypocrite.
The PETA people can kiss my ass, too.
But back to our little mouse. It’s a ‘she’ by the way. Because not only do we have to sacrifice her but we allowed a male mouse to have his way with her two weeks before her execution date.
So, she’s carrying his pups. And we need’em. Gots to have’em.
And now she’s dead. Flip her over on her back and squirt some alcohol on her. (I preferred ethanol.) Take scissors and snip a hole through her skin, low on her belly. Put down the scissors and rip her abdomen open. Sort of like you when you are on a one and a half hour flight to a medium-sized city and all they give you is a tiny package of peanuts.
Tear her abdomen open just like that little bag of peanuts.
When you do it, you’ll never forget the smell of her. It’s sharp. It’s bloody. Raw. It combines with the alcohol fumes and I know someone who swears they salivated every time they sac’d a mouse.
They weren’t proud of this though. They weren’t bragging or anything.
You’ve opened her up now and there they are! Her pups and they’re still alive. But, alas, not for long.
As far as a fetus goes, they’re really cute so you frown a little as you pull them out of their little casings.
Now pick that scissors up.
And snip off their heads. Take a good look at their tiny, sad heads and sigh to yourself.
Nobody said research was easy.
You have to dissolve them now so drop the headless bodies into tubes and add some hungry enzymes.
They’re ready now. It’s the cold, cold chill for them.
Pop the tubes into the liquid nitrogen tanks and throw away their mother and the heads and the gore.
Justify it to yourself once more.
(Hey, that rhymed!)
