Mice are evolving, getting smarter, faster and more able to detect poisons, because of their cohabitation with humans. Urban mice are apparently significantly more intelligent than ones found in the wild. It?s all down to natural selection. The smart ones don?t end up in a trap the fast ones don?t end up inside a cat and the ones with a good sense of smell don?t eat poison. They also produce around 730 generations a century compared to our 4 or 5 so they can evolve around 180 times faster than us. Not only are they getting more and more difficult to catch but our efforts to exterminate them are creating a type of super mouse that may one day overtake us and end up being the dominant species in this little arrangement we have. We had one in our house about a year ago. Smart little bugger. I found the tracks with talc and put baited traps in the way. Nothing. When I checked for tracks again they just went around the traps and I?m sure they spelt out ?fuck you? in one area. Poison was similarly ignored. Eventually I was forced to set my wife on it. She cornered it in the living room and I trapped it in a lunchbox. So there we were, face to face with nothing but a few millimetres of transparent Tupperware separating us. The hominid and the rodent. Two players in a Darwinian game being spun out over millennia. As once the hominid had looked out of the cave at the sabre toothed cat, whose pitiable decedents are now confined to our zoos, so now did the rodent look at out me, and I in at it. ?Aww, cute ickle mousy, couldn?t possibly kill it.? Thought I. (looking cute is probably another of their wily evolutionary adaptations.) ?Mug.? Thought the mouse And, ?I hope he lets me out near a rich person?s house. I?m sick of eating his crap cereal.?