This fall, the mouse is on the move. Not only are the little roguish rodents making their autumn invasions into our homes, but an uber-Mouse has recently invaded China. On Sept. 13, Mickey Mouse and his capitalist compadres set up shop in Hong Kong, making a home for their fifth giant theme park on the planet. Mickey Mouse, the Disney Corporation’s mascot, is the perfect leader for the expanding kingdom. Mice are nature’s premier niche-fillers, moving into every livable habitat on the planet. The world is their manifest destiny and your house is next on their list.

Here in New Hampshire, there are five kinds of mice: deer, white-footed, house, meadow jumping and woodland jumping. Thankfully, both of the jumping mice (some can leap up to 12 feet) do not care for urban living and thus stay out of our houses. Deer and white-footed mice are native species that sometimes join us inside human dwellings. They both have tawny fur and white tummies. The main difference is tail length: white-footed mice tails are shorter than the head and body combined, while the tail on the deer mouse is generally longer than the head and body. Both mice have a rather solitary nature, except during mating and cold weather when they shack up together.

If you see mice in your house after the first cold snap of the season, they are probably either deer or white-footed mice. If you have a year-round mouse guest, it’s likely their foreign cousin: the house mouse.

The house mouse is a little uniformly gray/brown rodent that’s actually an immigrant from Europe, likely a stowaway on the ships of settlers. The house mouse is strongly associated with humans; as people built bigger cities and spread out over the planet, so did the house mouse. They are also responsible for Morris the Cat, because house cats were likely domesticated specifically to eat house mice.

In addition to being world travelers, house mice are also fond of reproducing. A typical house mouse can have up to 12 babies that reach sexual maturity in three months. If all of the offspring survive from one pair of house mice, you would have about 4,500 mice in one year. Luckily, not all the mice survive. Given this zeal for making babies, it’s no surprise that the house mouse is the creature famous for “mouse plagues,” where hordes of mice overrun farm fields and grain stores. An often cited mouse plague in the United States is the California mouse plague of 1927, in which 82,000 house mice per acre were estimated in some areas.

This is when Disney and the house mouse might have first crossed paths. You see, right after the mouse plague of 1927 a brash rodent by the name of Mickey Mouse starred in his first feature film, “Plane Crazy,” in 1928. Coincidence? Perhaps. One possible explanation is that Mickey was a house mouse rabble rouser who abandoned his rodent revolutionaries during the plague and hooked up with “The Man.” “The Man” was Walter Elias Disney who saw the potential of this charismatic leader to build an imperialistic entertainment empire. The rest is history. (“Never forget that it all started with a mouse.” —Walt Disney)

Today, Disney is a corporate giant with a gross annual income of about $30.8 billion dollars. If Disney were a country, it would have the 93rd largest GNP out of the 258 countries ranked, beating out Jordan, Panama and Bolivia. Disney holdings include television (ABC), book publishing (Hyperion), magazines (Discover), radio (66 stations), cable (The Disney Channel, ESPN), music (Mammoth Records), theater (“Lion King”), and movies (Touchstone Pictures, Miramax). They also own many resorts, part of an oil company, a cruise ship line and a retail store chain. Another major source of income for the company is creative royalties (“When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are”—you owe us $5).

The problem with both house mice and Disney is that they ruin everything. House mice pee and poop everywhere, spreading disease and stinking up the place. Some very odd researcher calculated that a single house mouse will drop 18,000 turds in a year. They often foul their nest so horribly that they have to abandon them and move to a new location. Disney, too, is a spoiler, but they usually “pee” on the culture of an area by fouling it with their Techno-colored version American consumerism.

The latest Disney plague in Hong Kong shows just how invasive and exploitive a mouse can be. Disney got the Hong Kong government to put up $2.9 billion to build the park, while Disney chipped in a measly 20 percent ($513 million). Perhaps someone should explain capitalism to the Chinese. To top it off, they built the new park on “reclaimed land” from the ocean. So, Cinderella’s castle sits atop a once beautiful coral reef.

Clearly, all kinds of mice must be kept in check or they will ruin the world for the rest of us. Poisons, traps and protests aren’t really sustainable control methods. The secret to controlling a plague of either Mickey or a house mouse is to cut off their food supply. House mice will pack up and leave if food is securely locked away and garbage is properly sealed. The same is true for Mickey. Contrary to Disney’s public relations department, the Magic Kingdom does not run on imagination, it runs on cash. Lock your entertainment cash up in local stock, like community theater or live music, and The Mouse will leave you alone.