Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
Last summer, someone placed one in the house I was staying. We had a plumber over to fix the kitchen sink and as he was working on it, a little country mouse poked its head out of a hole on the side. The lady of the house freaked out and the plumber advised her to get a couple of "glues" to trap it. Someone went and fetched some and the plumber laid them out. The morning after the lady of the house left for work in a hurry and didn't check the traps so I was the first to look and see if the mouse was caught.
Oh, it was caught alright. The moment I opened the cupboard under the sink, it literally shrieked. A tiny little shriek, like someone pretending to be a baby mouse. It was tiny, definitely not an adult. It had soiled itself overnight, I guess when it realised it was stuck and couldn't move and panicked. It struggled to move away as I reached for the trap but of course it couldn't.
So OK, I put on a pair of tough gardening gloves and pulled it unstuck and cleaned it up very carefully with a bit of cotton and q-tips and gasoline and sent it off in the woods behind the house opposite from where the cats stay. It was totally stoned by the gasoline and it most likely got eaten by a snake or a bird, but at least it wasn't stuck.
These things are just cruel and malicious. They cause unnecessary suffering. I mean, kill the poor things if they're such a pest. Just don't torture them. They absolutely should be made illegal.
Sometimes they only eat a bit of the poison and then they die even more slowly and painfully. That just sucks. There must be a better way to kill them off, than to subject them to this kind of cruelty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodenticide
Nonlethal methods of mitigating human-rodent conflict tend to be effective in the long-term and consist of making human spaces less appealing to rodents. Steps include sealing holes in buildings, storing food in secure containers, and disposing of waste properly.
I have had mice get in my house a few times.
I hate glue traps. I had seen them used at a restaurant I used to work at, and it is pretty awful. They get stuck and panic and nearly (sometimes actually) rip themselves apart trying to escape.
But they're the only things I've seen that work. Because of what I saw with glue traps, I tried all sorts of "instant kill" traps. Some of them worked at first, but the mice quickly learned how to get the bait without setting off the trap, or they learned to set off the trap without getting caught. (No idea how - in some of these I'd have thought it'd be impossible.)
So I got some glue traps. They worked and they worked fast, and they got them all, both times this happened. You usually hear when they get caught, so I would get the trap, drown them, and dispose of it. It's pretty awful, but I'm sorry, I can't live with mice in my house.
My only real alternative is to get a cat, and trust me, having grown up with cats that ate mice and birds, they're not much more merciful.
> Winnipeg veterinarian Dr. Jonas Watson agrees with the group's position, pointing out that glue traps are also entirely indiscriminate, often trapping other animals as well.
This is a feature, not a bug. These traps are almost always placed inside, and whatever else is getting trapped is also a pest.
I have relatives living in the country. They get a lot of mice and went through a lot of these factory produced traps; nothing worked. Then they bought a couple of pretty simple traps made by local school kids in shop class. I believe the head count of each trap is now in the hundreds.
It's a pretty simple contraption: a wood brick with a burrow in it. You put a piece of food in the end of the hole, then tighten a steel spring and tie it down with a piece of thread, which goes through the trap and covers the hole, so that a rodent has to chew through the thread to get to that food. The spring pulls on a copper wire noose; you know the rest.
Maybe you could find (or make) something like that?
Take a 2 litre pop bottle, remove the cap, put some food with a little poison inside. Make a little ramp for the mouse to get in. The mouse can go in, but it's too slippery for them to get out, they can't get traction on the plastic. They die inside the bottle, but can't spread the poison around to cats or other predators that might eat them.
That sounds... overly complicated, and could only catch one per setting. Have they tried a glass bowl will oil?
And because they don't only get stuck by their feet, like their face, for example. If you're only planning on catch-and-release, then use a trap made for that. How silly do you have to be to glue them to a piece of paper, just to intend to un-glue them later?? That alone is cruel.
After the rat was caught, I had read about how they slowly suffocate over days, often chewing off their own limbs in a largely futile attempt to escape.
I ended up bludgeoning the rat. I still remember the high pitched scream it made upon receiving the first blow. It only lasted about a minute but it was a pretty fucked up experience, and that was going the merciful route.
How many times did you hit?
Definitely don't use poison. It's not painful for the rodents, but it makes its way up into the food chain. Mountain Lion P47 in CA is alleged to have died from rat poison ingestion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMAzyDDAppU
There doesn't seem to be a lot of distress/trauma involved -- in fact, if you watch to about 2:54, there's a rodent that apparently successfully avoids the trapdoor action and then more or less appears to think to itself "hey, what's down here, maybe I'll join the party."
Weird how people always seem to brag about how little empathy they have for animals whether it's a submission about glue traps or Beyond Meat. Though you usually need showdead=true to see them.
Unless you're planning on living on veggies grown in a hermetically sealed greenhouse, yeah, a lot of creatures died in a way that's a lot nastier than a glue trap to ensure that you could have food on your plate at a reasonable price. That's just the way it is.
I feel like growing up next to a farm vs working on a farm is a big difference and there's a lot of torturous death you didn't see. It's death. It sucks by nature.
I have observed people braking down in tears when a bug is stomped on and it's completely incomprehensible to me. I recognize that it's wrong and unnecessary but that's learned, I don't feel emotions toward the bug.
I would never use a glue trap because I understand that it's cruel and causes rodents to suffer and I have no emotions about it, it's a learned skill.
Am I a psychopath?
The logic by which i come to this conclusion is following: Any living creature can be simulated on a sufficiently good computer, so both pain and joy are just some calculations, and it doesn't matter if calculation is done by hand, on a silicon computer, or with real atoms. Mathematical function can not be evil or good by itself, and the difference between pain and joy must not be that large (otherwise there would not be masochists).
Killing is bad because you are taking the computational resources from someone else, and likely reducing the number of possible futures. But if you have already decided that you are going to kill the exact amount of suffering during that doesn't matter.
I wish someone could give me a logical argument why the proposition above is crazy and why not causing pain while killing is important.
Sometimes logic isn't enough to get out of the trap that logic got you into in the first place.
Maybe in some situations logic isn't enough (though i doubt that), but in situations like that thoughtless comment in the style "wHaT iF i CuT YoUr HaNd" is not enough either:)
I'd bet good money that such an experience would very quickly show you why having "computational resources" taken by someone else is so vigorously avoided by most creatures.
The parent comment's thought experiment of "if all pain is just computation, let me 'compute' your hand" neatly refutes the practicality of your stance. Sure, pain is mediated by the same physicochemical processes that govern every other aspect of our bodies. Tell that to someone suffering oncogenic bone pain, or a second-degree burn, or the pain of losing a life partner of 70 years.
You claim that you value the time you still have to live, and not the absence of all pain. What about your quality of life, whatever that means to you? Have you ever had, e.g., an infected tooth, been hit hard in the groin, or even badly sunburnt? What value, if any, do you place on the privilege of not having to "compute" those sensations?
Moving beyond physical pain, what's the longest you've ever stayed awake? Acute sleep deprivation causes no permanent damage and no physical pain, but real-world evidence confirms that at some point, subject to nonstop sleep deprivation, you would do anything that you thought could end the experience. I would. Anyone would. Some people would of course last longer than others, but everybody cracks, computer-simulated or not.
> i'll be happy to go through any amount of suffering if i knew that i have a week to live anyway, and my suffering can help science or someone i care about
I don't mean to dismiss your generosity or confidence in your ability to accept pain, but it's very easy to express this sentiment from the comfort of a relatively healthy body. It's true that looming certain death changes a person's attitude toward pain, but I would suggest for your own subjective (not logical, but subjective) wellbeing that you tighten up your "any amount of suffering" threshold.
I am also not talking about the ability to consciously keep choosing to go through pain for a bigger idea.
I am talking about the comparison between physical pain and death. Almost all cases when people experience pain in the real world are linked to death or permanent injury. This in conjugation with the knowledge of inevitability of death makes most people think that pain is worse or as bad as death.
But think of it this way: you have a choice to either be subjected to a month of most horrible suffering and then live completely healthy for a year or live your remaining month and then die without any pain. Would you choose the second? Why would anyone choose the second?
> Have you ever had, e.g., an infected tooth
yes, and i have tooth canals cleared without anesthetic several times, knowledge that after the half hour you'll be back to normal helps a lot.
> Acute sleep deprivation causes no permanent damage
Are you sure? I think people can die from it. The longest i've stayed awake was ~30 hours, i do not want to repeat it but even a longer version of it, or any from of torture are simply not comparable with dying. And saying "i killed it painlessly" is simply a way to comfort oneself, and doesn't help the one who is killed at all.
"Be humane" is not a useful advice since we do not know what exactly it means. A better advice is "Be curious".
I’ve used glue traps once, wouldn’t use it again after seeing what happened to the mouse. I went back to the old school spring traps, which are also cheap.
But given the mission there's no good outcome for the mice.
Even if you catch-and-release (in a far off field away from homes), mice are prolific and there's now probably a bunch of starving baby mice somewhere.
When a rat gets into my crawl space, it came from outside and I’m putting it back outside. It does give me pangs to think about the difficulty of life in the wild for critters, but catch-and-release seems like the best of all available options.
But name a more humane way than glue traps to remove spiders or house centipedes before they breed into the hundreds or thousands. Go look up some of the suggestions on because there are none (burn it down, spray x, y, z with peppermint oil, call the orkin, move houses). Any kind of poison/sprays are unsafe for pets, and would spread back to the ecosystem (to the detritivores). I could just empty my pillowcase from spiders and put cortisone on the bites before I go to work.
>Even the smallest and perhaps least appreciated animals with which we share our spaces deserve to be protected from blatant and heinous cruelty.
We are trying to euthanize mosquitos because they spread disease [0]. Maybe you heard of it [1]. They are r-adapted species and will breed to infinity (large discount rates). I care more for snakes and tarantulas which tend more towards k-adapted (small discount rates) because the world isn't infinite.
And speaking of advertising issues - this article looks like an advertisement for the lawyer's lawsuit. But my opinion on their opinion isn't interesting or meaningful.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_control#Proposals_to_...
They are cheap and with just one bottle I can protect lots of trees from ants going up the tree and cultivate and protect aphids.
Without ants to protect them, natural predators just do the work for me controlling the pests.
I have used them, but I don't use them lightly. Even tiny mice make a fair bit of noise when they get stuck. Then it is my responsibility to put them out of their misery as quickly and humanely as possible, no matter how unpleasant it is for me.
Personally, I think they can be used humanely. Don't use them outside, keep track of where they are in use, and euthanize the mice that it catches.
Is that worse than bleeding to death from Warfarin? Or being stuck in a trap that didn't break the neck?
"This humane trap kills rodents using a high-voltage shock and since rats are able to restart their hearts, the shock is applied for 2 minutes to ensure higher kill rates."
I feel like this must exist solely to satisfy some weird revenge or morbid urge. It's way more cruel, complicated, expensive, and probably less effective than a regular spring trap.
Being eaten alive sounds way more cruel than getting stuck and starving to death! /s
They definitely have a predator psyche.
Still, living in the country in an older home we tried for years to stay on top of our mouse problem. There's no way we could seal up all the holes and accesses here.
Once we got the cat, it was an instant transformation. A couple times a year the mice come in from outside looking for shelter and the cat has a week of entertainment and then we're mouse free.
Glue traps are horrible.
And I say this as person who has killed more than a few mice.
It's not like people use those to deliberately kill some endangered creatures (if yes, ban those people, not my glue trap). And by the way, banning them would also stupid because glue traps easily be made at home (I assume).
Invest in, or develop a better and cheaper way and let me know when you're ready.
We also need a laser-based mosquito killer device, those UV traps are crap. A while ago there were some cool demos on the Internet but I haven't seen any shipping products...