Since Caleb was the one who found and rescued our new kitten, June, he felt it was his responsibility to be her "mama" and train her to be a good cat for the Fish Sticks Farm.
He researched on the internet how a mama cat teaches her babies to catch mice. The mama delivers a dead mouse to them first so they can knock it around and play with it. Then she brings them an injured mouse so that they can practice catching it. Finally they hunt a healthy mouse.
As Caleb was working on the property one day, he lifted a barrel and found 2 live, mice. He captured them and put them in a bucket to bring home to assist June in her mouse-catching training. Unfortunately, Caleb didn't realize that mice can flatten their bodies to nearly nothing to squeeze into most spaces. He put the bucket of mice in the back of the Armada and laid a fan on top of it to serve as a lid. (This is where I roll my eyes and lecture on the lack of thought here!)
Lo and behold when he got home, the bucket was empty, much to his surprise.
I came into the house to find him playing video games and I asked him how the mouse training was going. He proceeded to tell me that they escaped. When I realized that they escaped IN OUR VEHICLE, I was not in the least bit happy to see him playing video games instead of searching for these rodents in our car!
We both searched high and low and could not find them. He concluded they must have gotten outside. I set a mouse trap on the console that night and told him to not share this story with his father after a long day at work!
The mouse trap remained untouched and I prayed and hoped that the mice had truly escaped the vehicle without us knowing.
One week later after having record-breaking high temperatures in middle TN in June, the smell came with a vengeance. The Armada reeked of dead animal like no other. Windows down, fan blowing, AC blasting - nothing would rid the vehicle of the atrocious smell.
Being the mom who can beat a dead horse, I daily asked my 17 year old son how he could possibly not know that a mouse could escape a bucket covered by an electric fan!!! as we both tried to continue to keep this little nasty secret from My Man.
Air fresheners and essential oils did not work.
We googled some more and found that oftentimes mice will crawl up into your dash board and die. We proceeded to take the entire dash board and front panel of the vehicle off to search for the mice remains. NOTHING FOUND!
Three weeks later, I came home to find the Armada parked on the street and My Man home alone.
"What is that horrendous smell in the Armada?" he asked.
So the secret was found out.
Almost 2 months later, the smell, although faint, was still lingering.
We bought a commercial ozone generator that claimed to eliminate dead animal odors from any space.
After multiple treatments, our vehicle smelled like a fresh ocean breeze. AHH!
And my son will never again put a live rodent in our vehicles!
At least not while he's living under our roof!
