
Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them - pseudolus
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/glue-traps-1.5149294
======
YeGoblynQueenne
I'm a meat eater with a clear conscience and I don't count myself as an animal
lover, but, man, those traps are horrible.

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.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
And I don't think rat poison is any better. Another time I was outside my work
building and I saw a mouse just standing there in the middle of the driveway.
I walked right up to it and it didn't run. I squatted down next to it and I
saw it was heaving and shivering, like it was trying to regurgitate something.
All the time I sat there and watched it, it didn't once seemed to acknowledge
me.

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.

~~~
nightwing
We could use gene drive to eliminate all of them without causing physical pain
to any particular one. Maybe not having children will cause psychological
pain, but many people seem to chose that on their own, so maybe that's not
very bad</s>

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
What is it with the sarcastic comments in this thread? At this point I have
trouble following the humour.

------
Amezarak
> 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.

~~~
butteroverflow
>I tried all sorts of "instant kill" traps

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?

~~~
cmrdporcupine
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.

------
rident
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.

~~~
Shikadi
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

~~~
__blockcipher__
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.

~~~
NullPrefix
>upon receiving the first blow?

How many times did you hit?

~~~
__blockcipher__
A lot of times. It was dead pretty quickly but I went a bit overboard just to
be sure.

------
hombre_fatal
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.

~~~
nightwing
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.

~~~
itbeho
Suffering is suffering. I don't care what level it's on. The ends don't
justify the means. Be humane about it.

~~~
nightwing
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".

------
brohoolio
Not the kind of link I’d expect on hacker news.

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.

~~~
krona
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.

~~~
giarc
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).

------
ourmandave
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.

~~~
Zak
A good outcome for mice over the long term is to seal off holes in the
building so mice stop coming inside.

~~~
leguminous
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.

------
smittywerben
Banning these before the myriads of poisons at the store is putting the cart
before the horse. We use box traps to catch and release rodents.

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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosquito_control#Proposals_to_eradicate_mosquitoes)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death)

------
idiot900
Are glue traps more or less humane than what happens to these creatures in the
wild?

------
whenchamenia
Search 'mousetrap mondays' for a great yter who demonstrates many more humane
traps.

~~~
chrismeller
I’m not sure swimming until you drown counts as more humane...

------
hevi_jos
I love glue traps, but not for rats, for ants.

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.

------
ficklepickle
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?

------
tyingq
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.

~~~
icebraining
Spring traps aren't necessarily better. It can crush organs and keep them
stuck, while taking longer than 2m to actually kill them.

~~~
tyingq
I'd be interested to see some actual data. Is there a kill trap that's
reliably quick? I can see the electrocution one failing to kill as well.

~~~
skinnymuch
Someone linked to [https://AutomaticTrap.com](https://AutomaticTrap.com).

------
juskrey
I am worried about cockroaches

~~~
gumby
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.

------
dev_dull
Sometimes I wonder if our generation will be remembered as the people looking
for the next thing to indignantly complain about.

------
piedpiper19
They should also ban cats while they are on this.

Being eaten alive sounds way more cruel than getting stuck and starving to
death! /s

~~~
paleogizmo
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.

~~~
koffiezet
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...

------
Kagerjay
I stuck fly glue traps in my old workplace one time to catch some mosquitoes,
I ended up catching a lizard instead. It was horrifying seeing what happened
to it, his whole body had glued onto the trap with stretch marks, tail and
arms were amputated trying to get off of it. He looked me dead in the eyes
with sorrow as I had to roll up the trap and toss him in the trash, because I
didn't have much other choice at the time. Didn't have the heart to put him
out of his misery.

Glue traps are horrible.

------
megous
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.

------
koffiezet
The problem is that in some industries (food processing for example),
alternatives are in many cases forbidden. Crush traps can leave a mess and
contaminate things if animals are just wounded, poison - well that's clear I
guess, and live traps is the same as keeping live animals on premise, which is
not allowed.

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southern_cross
Glue traps (and similar) are a safe, effective, and pesticide-free way of
taking care of various bug problems, so there's that. If you want to educate
folks on more humane ways of taking care of mice and rats and such that's
fine, but outright banning these traps is probably taking things a bit too
far.

------
Simulacra
Ok but fly paper we keep. Right?

------
onychomys
I rescued a chipmunk from a glue trap while walking my dog last week. They
really are inhumane. It's 2019, we should be better than this.

~~~
dev_dull
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.

------
mrhappyunhappy
Reminds me of the latest black mirror episode with guy trying to make a mouse
stun device.

------
OrgNet
I feed a wild cat and he takes care of the mouse problem that I didn't know I
had... He usually decapitates them.

~~~
petee
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.

------
mythrwy
100% fully agree.

And I say this as person who has killed more than a few mice.

------
Proven
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...

------
treycopeland
i use glue traps all year round, catches tons of bugs and mice. once it's
full, just toss it.

