Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #167 - Mousetrap

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Mousetrap

From the day mankind started planting crops, we've been in competition with rodents. Mice and rats eat crops, pilfer the harvest from granaries and contaminate what's left with their droppings, nibble their way through wires, ropes and cables. They are even accused of biting children and spreading diseases, although in the latter case it's likely to have been inadvertent.

So we have developed all kinds of ways to try to control rodents. Traps, poisons, buildings adapted to try to make them rodent-proof. In medieval times the rat-catcher was a vital urban specialist. The Pied Piper of Hamelin deserved to have been paid promptly ! But on the other hand, rodents have been beneficial in some ways. Without mice, cats wouldn't have domesticated us. Rats were the first to spot rotten hulls in a ship, getting off and alerting the crew as the bilges filled with sea water and drove them to abandon ship. The competition has spurred architecture and chemistry among other sciences.

Tell me about rodents in your scifi of fantasy setting ! What are they like, what challenges or threats do they pose ? Are they the same kind of thing we humans face in the real world, or is there anything especially unusual about them ? How do people see them; as cute but a bit annoying, or a civilisational threat ? What techniques are used to keep people and crops safe from them ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.
• AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
• Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.

People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah

If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂