When the wind storm last week blew everything alive into a frenzied attempt to stay that way, my apartment was visited by a pair of mice. I like to think they were a couple, although I have no proof.

Together they menaced the kitchen after dark, rattling the pots and pans, pitter-pattering across the cookie sheets. Every night I woke up thinking someone was breaking in, only to realize that Mr. and Mrs. Mouse were out making the rounds. I realized they had to go, but it took me a week to break down and buy traps.

I used to have a pair of gerbils, and mice didn’t seem too far from gerbils in the fuzzy, cute order of living things. These gerbils made soft little nests and gnawed on everything in sight. One day the male gerbil got its leg caught in the mesh at the bottom of the cage and broke it. Not wanting it to suffer, I killed it as humanely as possible. I didn’t feel particularly bad about that.

But I felt bad going in the store to buy mouse traps. After all, these mice were just doing what mice were supposed to do. They were fulfilling their role in the cosmic order, and here I was setting springy steel traps that snapped like wire cutters on their little necks. I felt like a big bully, but I did it anyway.

I put one trap on the kitchen floor and one in the lower cabinets. In less than an hour I heard a snap and found one of the mice, eyes open like little black beads, wiskers perked, coat sleek and healthy. I put it and the trap in a plastic bag and deposited it in the dumpster.

The sight of the dead mouse made me feel bad. Was I one of those people who couldn’t hurt a fly? Obviously not, since, despite my distaste with the whole business, I did set those traps. As the other trap snapped shut on Mr. or Mrs. Mouse, I realized what a confused set of feelings people attached to the matter.

I have a bird named Ernie on whom I spend too much money, and to whom I’ve attributed qualities normally reserved for human beings. He’s learned how to whistle at me (a very endearing habit) and he does a great Ronald Reagan impersonation by ducking his head and tweeting as if to say “well.” Best of all, he has moods. One day he’s happy, the next grouchy. Maybe between him and memories of pet gerbils, it was only normal that I would feel guilty about knocking off a small beady eyed little animal that squeaked.

Everyone walks by the meat counter at the grocery store without feeling any guilt. Perhaps we even pick up a package of chicken wings. The difference is that we don’t usually think of chickens as little pseudo-people. Most of us never see a chicken while it’s alive and we don’t think about it much. But mice are like gerbils or hampsters. We shouldn’t have to kill them, especially in person. The same goes for our tax money. Sting has a song on his Synchronicity album called [[e]]Murder by Numbers in which he sings: “You can reach the top of your profession, if you become the leader of the land. ‘Cause murder is the sport of the elected. You don’t need to lift a finger of your hand.”

The truth is people lose more sleep over killing mice than over whether the contras are killing people in Nicaragua or the Soviets are killing people in Afghanistan. Human nature is such that unless the incident is in your own back yard, you’re really not sure it’s happened at all or whether it is a story that you see every night for a few minutes on the evening news. Unvoiced, there is a certain confusion over whether chickens are real or just neatly packaged bits of nutrition that never lived, manufactured for the supermarket freezer only.

I disposed of the second mouse, feeling slightly criminal but nevertheless assured of a good night’s sleep. So what was still bugging me about those tiny, insignificant creatures? Probably just a little associational guilt, as our vice president is fond of saying. Luckily, Ernie has no idea who he’s living with. If he did, he might just want to high-tail if back to the tropics.

Shhh. Please, don’t anybody fill him in.