I don't want your nasty friends in my house!

There is one member of our family that is not allowed to bring friends home. I don't mean to discriminate, but I don't like the friends she chooses and I don't want to share my home with them - even for a little while. She's very insistent, however, and keeps sneaking them in. Especially in the middle of the night. And this isn't the friend I want to see, or to step on, in the morning before I've had coffee.


Image Citation: Johnny N. Dell, , Bugwood.org

Shelby's "friends" aren't welcome. Shelby is the dog, and she's very cute and sweet and all, but she keeps digging ankle killing holes in the yard just to unearth one of these suckers so that she can gently take it in her mouth, relocate it to the rug inside the house, and spit it out. Then sometimes she will bark at it - because she has carefully preserved its life...and these things will start to move after playing dead for a while and the family must be alerted that there is an intruder in the house at 2:37 in the morning.

They first started to appear last year and after the 4th or 5th one came inside via my dog, I stopped obsessively smooshing and flushing and finally wondered what the hell it was. So I scooped it into a yogurt container and took it to Home Depot, to the nearest pimply or crotchety person wearing an orange apron in the Lawn and Garden department. The conversation, to the best of my recollection, went as follows:

"What the hell is this?"
chuckling. "Is your grass dead yet?"
"It's been more weeds than grass for a while. But what the hell is it?"
"That is a Mole-Cricket"
"Is there any way I can get the dog to stop digging them up and bringing them inside?"
"You could kill them."
"Okay, we'll go with that. Where do you keep the mole-cricket poison?"
"Oh, it's too late for a poison now. That's an adult - you have to poison the nymphs. Early April."
"Well, I'll just buy the poison now and give it a try anyway."
"You can't. We don't sell that poison."

I'm still not sure what sort of who's on first thing was going on at the Home Depot that day, but I ended up leaving and frustrated and certainly never using that container again. So this month Shelby started again with the "friends" and I promptly got online and ordered some heavy duty mole-cricket ass kicking poison, thereby getting myself on several federal watch lists I'm sure, and have started going out into the middle of the night, cackling and killing.

I'll let you know how it goes.