Random; vague theme: killing animals or not

[urbpan]

As usual, the best take on news I'm interested in is delivered by The Onion:
After nearly being driven to extinction 50 years ago, the gray wolf has been removed from the endangered list and can be hunted again. What do you think?
"Well, I was just going to build a taller fence to protect my sheep, but if the government says I can shoot them, I guess I should."

In Pest Control, they call that a "cultural control," or preventing the pest problem from happening in the first place. Anyway, I think they should let the gray wolf spread into the areas that it's been extirpated from before taking it off the endangered list. We haven't had wolves in New England in about 400 years, and it shows in our deer overpopulation problem. Everyone in the northeast suburban sprawl should be happy to have wolves in their back yards! Don't leave the cat out, and probably you should go out with junior, especially around dusk.


On the other side of the coin, a father and son inventor team has developed a new weird pest control product. They're calling it (in the headline) a "humane" rat trap. It uses valerian and other ingredients to make rats fall asleep. What the hell you are supposed to do with unconscious rats is another question (along with "how long will they stay asleep?"). It makes me think of the Adam West Batman tv show, where the Joker would use sleeping gas to knock out Batman and Robin, and then put them in a death trap so that they wake up in a giant hourglass or something with their utility belts still on. If the goal is to kill them, KILL THEM. So it is with rats. I suppose an unconscious rat will be easier to humanely euthanize than one that's thrashing about in a "have a heart" trap, its jaws bloody from hours of having tried to chew its way out.

The article comes with a smiling endorsement from PETA, an organization famous for Passionate Objections, but lacking on Reasonable Alternatives. They do not make any guesses about what a homeowner (or, heaven help us, a farmer) should or could do with unconscious rats. They mention the happy family life of a rat, which will surely be disrupted by translocating the sleepy fellow; not to mention that in most places that's illegal, and serves only to create a rat problem elsewhere--imagine if it was a pregnant female! They emphasize that there are humane alternatives to killing rats, without specifying them. Storing all edible substances in rat-proof containers is the first one I can think of. "Edible substances" means "everything except steel and glass." "Rat proof" means "made of steel or glass". There are intermediary steps, such as various kinds of exclusion work, but these only work if you are also killing rats.

Comments pointing out my hypocrisy are most welcome.

Comments

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

rats with little utility belts...

i imagine rats also cannot currently eat: titanium, iron, magnesium, asteroids, godzilla, diamonds, alumina based ceramics, and high velocity 30-06. mmm. we might have a solution in there if only science can come through :)

i would imagine feeding the rats roofies would lead to interesting rat behavior...

#

[kryptyd.livejournal.com]

I'm certainly never going to have to worry about bumping into wolf on this tiny, heavily populated island. We are the least forested country in Europe. Not that wolves need forests necessarily, but we don't have any plains or tundras either.

[drocera.livejournal.com]

Accoding to my grandmother, rats sneak into cribs at night and bite babies (LOL) so maybe someone could come up with, I don't know...an infant decoy rat trap. Or at least teach infants to lie in wait for rats and then go all Ozzy on them when they venture into the cribs.

Oh wait, babies don't have teeth.

[wirrrn.livejournal.com]

Poor wolves! Leave them be! I'm dubious any time an animal is removed from the Endangered List, as it usually ends up right back on there again before too long...

Unconscious Rat Trap sounds like a good idea- then you could sneak them into an abandoned building or a subway and let them go- much like I do with the mice I catch when we have them (using the old food-baited bucket with a collapsable ramp trick)

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

I'm confused. snapping their necks with a spring loaded bar isn't humane enough? Assuming thei going to kill this sleeping rats, what are thes going to use? A three phase lethal injection?

[roaming.livejournal.com]

The problem with the spring-loaded snap trap is that there's enough times when it doesn't land in exactly the right spot to snap their necks and kill them instantly. (Those dang things don't cooperate so politely.) So you may just paralyze them, or get a leg, whereupon they spend panicked hours frantically gnawing their legs off to escape.

Hey, maybe put them to sleep first. . . THEN line their little necks up in exactly the right spot and guillotine them! Yeh, that's the ticket! ;->

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I should have remembered that, but it's been a long time since I've had to dispatch a rodent. Your explaination brought back a grotesque memory of a trail of blood that led to a mouse that had died a slow an horrible death while trying to drag itself to safety.

Are there any traps that involve explosives?

[roaming.livejournal.com]

I'm sure a search of the Darwin Awards will uncover some. :-)

[g-weir.livejournal.com]

The idea of knocking mice and rats out in order to do them in later led me to find this Disney clip from youtube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW1-akAUh3U

If Basil of Baker Street is any indication, your needlessly slow dunking mechanism hasn't got a chance.

--G

[(Anonymous)]

I wonder how PETA feels about bedbugs?

They are warm creatures with tender family relationships. (Follow-up offensive anti-PETA remark stricken.)

[roaming.livejournal.com]

Hypocrisy? I don't see no stinkin' hypocrisy. :-)

(sigh) Well, I figure living in close quarters with rats, and the disease that they can bring, makes it an "us or them" proposition. We gotta kill 'em, or suffer the consequences. If we can kill them quick and painless, I'm all for that. Would I kill it not quick and painless? I don't see why. We're smart. We send people to the moon, split atoms, invent automatic cat-poop-scooping machines. We surely can invent SOMETHING, yes?

What do wolves eat in the wild if they don't have ranchers' sheep available? (Answer: mice, voles, rabbits.) I'd say give ranchers tax cuts for building taller/stronger fences.

Though I shudder for the deer. . . . jeez, now my head hurts. Ahh, Nature sucks sometimes! Short, nasty, brutish.

a wolf-killing perspective from someone who's been there (amongst the wolf-killers, not killing herself)

time to wake up...

[lucubr8r.livejournal.com]

From the little experience of a lab rat, some rodents start regaining consciousness from pharmacological anaesthesia in about 30-45 minutes, not to mention that the fat ones require a larger dose to knock them out in the first place. I suspect the valerian-fed ones will be quite happily awake long before the human inhabitants are roused from their nocturnal slumbers...

On a tangential note, there are some amusing rat-baiting methods in J.B.S. Haldane's short story "Rats".

Re: time to wake up...

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Excellent points.

From what I've seen with chemical immobilizations at the zoo, it's very tricky. The idea that a knock-out bait would be effective is pretty far-fetched.

[gemfyre.livejournal.com]

You make perfect sense to me.

Allowing an animal to be hunted as soon as it's removed from an endangered list is just asking for it to go straight back on that list. Dumb.

As for the rats. I would much prefer a trap that killed them without me having to be involved (i.e. a traditional style trap). In Broome we used Elliot traps, mainly because there were also native mice as well as ferals. But once we caught a feral mouse - then what? None of us wanted to kill it. Eventually we let it go in an area frequented by snakes and goshawks and hoped that they'd do the dispatching.

[elainetyger.livejournal.com]

Releasing rats and mice elsewhere is a sissy move; the trapper doesn't want the rodents to exist but doesn't want the moral responsibility of doing the killing and instead shifts the burden to someone else, allowing the animals to procreate and multiply in the meantime.

With rats, better to kill them asap with as little handling as possible to prevent getting a disease. They are wily fuckers, though. I know one grocery store owner who, after trying exterminators without success, finally got the job done by waiting next to a tunneling hole in his basement while holding a baseball bat.