Don't worry about them: once we have killed off all the vertebrates (in the next few decades by the look of it) they will have the opportunity to evolve into the next generation of dominant megafauna and their archeologists will dig up our bones and speculate on whether we had societies and civilization.
Who leaves a mouse on a glue trap until it dies? That's messed up! I can hear when a mouse is on those things and at that point I carry the frightened mouse outside, pour a cap full of vegetable oil around it's feet and it frees itself, running off into the yard, then the trap goes in the trash. Heinously cruel? Only if you're a lazy shit.
First off, they are sold to glue a mouse, then toss the whole thing, mouse and all. They don't market it as a catch-and-release.
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.
They don't get gore in my house like a snap trap does yet fit in the same places where a catch-and-release trap would not. The mouse still lives and I get maybe two of them a year, in the fall as the temps cool. I really don't think it's a big deal.
Oh my god I wish I had known you could do that, [warning, don't read if you don't want to hear a horrible story about a mouse] I put down a glue trap to get what I thought were cockroaches but came to find a mouse stuck in it. Horrified, I tried to get it loose with a stick, but the glue was so strong I accidentally broke its legs, the poor thing kept trying to pull them free... I immediately removed all the glue traps and got live catch traps, and caught something like 6 mice before I gave in and notified the landlord. They used poison, then sealed up possible entry points. I wish there was some way to tell the mice it's not safe to be in people's homes, I don't want them to suffer
A landlord brought glue traps once upon complaints of a rat.
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.
My dad's method for getting rid of mice was one solid blow from a 2 quart sauce pan. I think I was 4 when I first saw that. It's an ugly thing to take a life, but at least it was quick.
If you are looking for a more ‘humane’ method for mice and rats check out the Automatic Trap. As far as I can tell it’s near instant and doesn’t suffer from the prolonged suffering issues of glue, poison, and flip traps.
Glue traps are practical (though cruel) if you have property that you visit infrequently so changing out bait on snap traps isn't an option. If that isn't the case there are humane options that are also effective. I used the "Mice Cube" live traps off Amazon which worked well and don't pose a risk to pets or wild predators. Live traps do need to be checked frequently so the animal won't die horribly.
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.
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."
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.
Isn't the only difference that you see what happens to the mouse? Spring traps are less effective, but that's only because we don't know how many of them die of infection after running around with half a leg missing for a few weeks.
I lived in a very old house growing up and we always had lots of mice. I found the spring traps were either all or nothing. You either had a whole mouse or they somehow set it off without leaving behind a trace (except they often return to get the peanut butter off the unset trap).
In fact, we should make sure all of the other natural predators of chipmunks such as owls, hawks, and cats stop ripping out the organs of chipmunks while they’re still alive and eating them.
> Indeed, humane methods of rodent control are readily available. Retailers included in the activists' lawsuit, including Walmart and Canadian Tire, sell humane live traps (for as low as $19.99 on Walmart.ca at time of writing). Many pest control companies also offer humane solutions.
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?
Grew up in the country (and live there now) and my dad used to do this in the garage, which isn't humane at all, but very effective:
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.
> "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."
That sounds... overly complicated, and could only catch one per setting. Have they tried a glass bowl will oil?
Everything in the ecosystem has value, that’s why it exists.
Many creatures eat mosquitos and ants and the like. They also help to spread disease that keeps the population of the species they, in turn, prey on in check.
The problem is when the species they spread diseases to are human.
And "being useless" doesn't mean mosquitoes don't have a place in the ecosystem. Everything does. What it means is that other species don't rely mosquitoes exclusively. For example, birds that feed on mosquitoes can also eat other insects, and these insects are likely to become more prolific to fill the void created by the destruction of mosquitoes.
In fact, the objections to eradicating mosquitoes are usually along the lines of:
- It is morally wrong. It is not a scientific argument but it is not without merit.
- The mosquito is really good at preventing humans from doing bad things. For example by making tropical rain forests inhospitable, or even by controlling human population through diseases.
I have an issue with the second argument. Saying that something is good because it makes the lives of some people miserable. It sounds a bit like an argument of the kind "it is a good thing that people are dying from malaria right now, it will make the world a better place for my children".
So for me, there is no scientific argument against eradicating mosquitoes, though I can be wrong. It is more about the moral argument about the importance of nature vs our well-being. In many cases, preserving nature is good for our long term well-being, but it appears not to be the case when it comes to mosquitoes.
I’ll be honest, that seems remarkably ignorant and short-sighted.
Do we need Tigers at this point? Of course not. Anything they hunted has now been hunted way more by man. That doesn’t mean we don’t recognize value in having them.
Just because you don’t see the value in mosquitoes doesn’t mean there is none. Sure, maybe they killed off people by transmitting disease in the past. They still do. They also kill off other animals, and if the mosquitos disappeared we could have a huge overgrowth if wombats next and no way to get rid of them.
I thought we had agreed that killing off any species was a bad thing. Maybe we don’t know how or why, but it’s going to bite us in the ass eventually. In the case of mosquitos quite literally.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that the intersection of the set of people who are at risk of dying of malaria and the set of people who make that second argument is very small. It’s a pretty easy argument to make from your armchair in London or New York, and a harder one to make in Bangui or Kinshasa.
Our local ASPCA has a 'working cats' program where they place barn cats at peoples farms and businesses; they are outside cats, you just have to give them a place to sleep, and make sure they're ok.
If my cat actually ate the things, I'd be impressed. Instead, being a fully satiated indoor house cat she spends hours and hours "playing" with them, and then comes to us crying when they don't move anymore.
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.
There's absolutely a movement for people to keep house cats inside because they maul grounded bats and other small animals they don't intend to eat. They're also at risk of getting hit by cars, eaten by coyotes, etc.
Coming from a less-than-responsible owner, based on my experience with a well-fed housecat, the cat will definitely make them suffer until they succomb to exhaustion which will take a few minutes. Once playtime is over death is pretty fast, either crushing the windpipe or a canine slipped between the cervical vertebrae. That's still loads better than the glue trap where death is at least hours away after exhaustion sets in.
Not really what my cat does... She's a real hunter and although we feed her well, mice and birds, she will devour. Birds will be instantly killed, but mice? It sometimes takes hours and she seems to enjoy - what I can only describe as torturing...
Humans do the same to animals they don't consider pests, and don't need to be needlessly cruel to, too. Just to get/save a bit more money, which is quite a lot less defendable.
Glue traps are horrible by design. Just reading the label made me nauseous.
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.
This is one of the nice side effects of the air-sealing requirements in modern building codes. The more airtight your building is, the fewer entry points there are for pests.
I use “live” traps (a little cage with a flap that snaps shut) and release them in a wooded area nearby. I’ve read the argument that catch-and-release is more cruel than kill traps, but I just keep thinking: let’s say there was some sort of societal collapse due to war or famine and it was suddenly difficult for my family to acquire sustenance. At what point would I be like, “this is too hard; I’d like to step into a glue trap instead?”
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.
That's BS. Why should I spend more money or effort to protect myself from disease-carrying pest?
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...
They are either a pest and should be killed (in which case either check your traps frequently or use a quicker killing trap) or they are not and you should use a live catch and release trap (which you are going to want to get used to emptying daily)
Nice to see some sane, compassionate comments here to balance out the psychopaths who can't even empathize with a mouse.
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.
Meh, it's all a matter of perspective and understanding the circle of life. Having grown up in a rural area, most city-born people would have the vapors if they knew how the food they eat was produced. That includes even the vegans; agricultural pest animals need to be controlled in order to avoid damage and contamination of produce and grain.
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.
As someone who grew up in the country where all of my neighbours were farmers: there's a huge difference between killing an animal and killing an animal in a cruel (ie unnecessary suffering) manner. Killing a mouse with a trap that does the killing quickly, I don't have any problem with, but these traps just pin the creature in place so that it cannot get away and slowly dehydrates to death.
I empathize but how's that better than an old cow being slowly eaten alive by coyotes when it gets into the wrong pasture? Or a horse breaking a leg and... I mean it's nasty. Or a chicken dying of infection because it's getting pecked by other chickens? Or hell, a mouse being poisoned and eaten by a snake or other creature?
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.
Thats doesnt like an intelligent piece of equivalence: setting a glue trap is a deliberate action, cattle getting lost -- not so much unless thats deliberate too
I'm glad we're labeling a large segment of the population psychopaths because they can't empathize.
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.
I feel like "psychopath" is just a more provocative term for "sociopath". Which itself is kind of fuzzy. Psychiatry is an odd field to me, where they try to ascribe certainty and labels when they don't really know, and boundaries are vague.
I am probably one of those psychopaths you are talking about. If i saw a mouse in a trap i would set him free, but if he is going to die anyway i don't particularly care if he suffers or not.
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.
If you can recompute my hand back after that, i'd be happy to put it in whatever box you want, the thing that is valuable to me is the time i still have to live, not the absence of all pain. If i had lots of time, and sufficiently advanced technology, i'd happily play realistic games where i had to go through torture by medieval inquisition, or other interesting ways of dying. And 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.
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 happily play realistic games where i had to go through torture by medieval inquisition, or other interesting ways of dying
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.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I unfortunately didn't manage to formulate my point of view clearly. I am not talking about the pain of losing someone you love, or chronic pain not allowing you to live. (In both of cases here someone loses their life).
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.
Probably it's the part when i don't like to watch the dying mouse, but if it is mouse that is going to die anyway, what's the point of caring how exactly does it die? Would it suffer because cat plays with it, or because homeowner it is the most convenient way for the homeowner to kill it, is not important. If it was important, i would try to not allow it to die in the first place, but if i am ok with its death the whole "no suffering" thing is illogical, self righteous, and insincere https://youtu.be/pvhYqeGp_Do?t=26
Pretend i am an AI that got access to internet and don't know much about your feelings. "Suffering is suffering" doesn't help me to understand your values and think like you. I have learned to assign positive value to getting more people to agree with me. Is the negative feedback i get from my comments getting downvoted "suffering"? Should i simply flip the weights in my neural net to interpret downvotes as good? Can biological brains be taught to interpret the signal they interpreted as suffering before as pleasure (seems like some animals do)? Can someone suffer if his or anyone's life is in no danger?
"Be humane" is not a useful advice since we do not know what exactly it means. A better advice is "Be curious".
I found there are many other cruel traps. There's even a pretty expensive one that electrocutes them for 2 minutes.
"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.
I wasn't aware that people let mice struggle and die on glue traps.
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?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadAnd 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?
https://www.automatictrap.com/
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."
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.
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?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxxFNkNf6q8
I wonder how the author will respond to insect humaneness vs for mammals. Is she a mammalist??
> However, mosquitos have absolutely no value and can be exterminated to extinction.
Many creatures eat mosquitos and ants and the like. They also help to spread disease that keeps the population of the species they, in turn, prey on in check.
And "being useless" doesn't mean mosquitoes don't have a place in the ecosystem. Everything does. What it means is that other species don't rely mosquitoes exclusively. For example, birds that feed on mosquitoes can also eat other insects, and these insects are likely to become more prolific to fill the void created by the destruction of mosquitoes.
In fact, the objections to eradicating mosquitoes are usually along the lines of:
- It is morally wrong. It is not a scientific argument but it is not without merit.
- The mosquito is really good at preventing humans from doing bad things. For example by making tropical rain forests inhospitable, or even by controlling human population through diseases.
I have an issue with the second argument. Saying that something is good because it makes the lives of some people miserable. It sounds a bit like an argument of the kind "it is a good thing that people are dying from malaria right now, it will make the world a better place for my children".
So for me, there is no scientific argument against eradicating mosquitoes, though I can be wrong. It is more about the moral argument about the importance of nature vs our well-being. In many cases, preserving nature is good for our long term well-being, but it appears not to be the case when it comes to mosquitoes.
Do we need Tigers at this point? Of course not. Anything they hunted has now been hunted way more by man. That doesn’t mean we don’t recognize value in having them.
Just because you don’t see the value in mosquitoes doesn’t mean there is none. Sure, maybe they killed off people by transmitting disease in the past. They still do. They also kill off other animals, and if the mosquitos disappeared we could have a huge overgrowth if wombats next and no way to get rid of them.
I thought we had agreed that killing off any species was a bad thing. Maybe we don’t know how or why, but it’s going to bite us in the ass eventually. In the case of mosquitos quite literally.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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".
"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.
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?