How do you propose we gather that evidence? Mouse surveys? Asking grants fo torture mice while we attach little electrodes to their brains to see if the brain areas light up that are connected to pain in higher mammals?
How do you see if any creature that can’t talk suffers? How do you judge suffering in a human baby? Body language and empathy, that’s how. The same way I judge pain in a mouse. I know it is slowly dying. I know mice have higher nervous systems that are keenly capable of sensing pain, in order to learn how to avoid it. We all know mice and rats learn fast. I see that the mouse in my OP had lost its normal behavior, that it was still conscious and only intermittently aware of its surroundings. I saw it convulse and writhe and although it didn’t seem physically hurt, it wasn’t able to scurry away. How can any person with even an ounce of empathy NOT draw the conclusion such a mouse was suffering from great pain?
And how is letting an animal suffer such pain for hours or days on end NOT torture?
I understand you not wanting mice in your house. All I ask is that you consider more animal friendly versions of pest control as well.
But what about when traps don’t work (as has been mentioned umpteen times upthread), and what are these fast-acting/painless poisons of which you speak??
Seriously, it’s all well and good to talk about ‘humane’ methods of despatching critters when you don’t have them living with you. But when you walk into your house, and all you can smell is mouse shit…when you go to get a towel out of the cupboard and have to shake newborn kittens out before you can dry yourself…when you think you’ve got the DT’s because all you can see in your peripheral vision is things scuttering around the perimeters of your loungeroom…then whatever works to get rid of the vermin is OK.
Maastricht, are there Home Depots there or were you translating?
I’m reasonably sure that if I talked about Galerías or El Corte Inglés, the inmense majority of the board wouldn’t have the foggiest what am I talking about; Macy’s, I’d be surprised if anybody in this board doesn’t recognize the name. Sometimes people do this kind of translation automatically.
Call it Home Depot, Walmart, Bunnings, Kmart…the source is pretty irrelevant really: just name any big department store that sells shit to kill rats…regardless of one’s country.
I didn’t claim that poisoning was torture. Secondly, do you have a shred of common sense? Are you telling me, that leaving a mouse on a glue trap to slowly die isn’t torture for it? I’ve seen mice on glue traps with their faces ripped off and their legs broken. They’re continually in a state of fear, they squeal a lot and wriggle to the extent that they break their legs. They are known to chew off their limbs to escape.
Why do I need to provide “evidence” for something that is completely obvious? It’s like saying I should provide evidence that crucifixion is torture. But if you want links to the completely obvious, I’ll be more than happy to provide you “evidence”.
You don’t need to leave a mouse on a glue trap to slowly and painfully die to achieve this aim though. That’s the point. Put it out of its misery and not be a callous jerk about it.
I was translating. There are no Home Depots in the Netherlands as far as I know. Our DIY home improvement chains are called Praxis, Gamma, Formido and a few others.
Globalization IS a hungry beast, though. We have MacDonalds, Pinky’s, Applebee’s, Burger King and I’m sure many other chains that are also active in the US or US based.
And I’d like to know how chucking a still-alive animal into the trash so it starves to death is effective, or has anything to do with pest control for that matter.
“Whatever works” - hah. I once knew a guy who used to catch rats in cages, and scald them with boiling water. Is that OK now, because you don’t like the smell ? After all, it still “gets rid of them”.
And you know it was poisoned how exactly? Did you perform an autopsy? Did you take a blood sample and order a toxicology report?
Or did you just take a wild guess because that’s what makes you feel good?
We are supposed to be fighting ignorance here, not promulgating it. Mice are just as prone to disease as humans are, and much more prone to injury. Concluding that a mouse has been poisoned on the basis of vague symptoms is about as ignorant as it gets.
I take that back. This is about as ignorant as it gets.
Bromadiolone is a very basic anticoagulant. It in no sense dessicated the animal from the inside out. It works by preventing the blood from clotting, leading numerous micro-bleeds, oedema and eventual death from either stroke or haemorrhagic shock. Far from desiccating the animals form the inside out, rodents poisoned by anticoagulants frequently have a higher moisture content than normal.
The reason anticogulants prevent smells inside the wall is because one of the symptoms is thirst. Under normal circumstances rats and mice don’t need to drink, they can get all the moisture they need fro their food. As a result the use of poisons such as strychnine will cause them to remain in their nests until they die, producing an unpleasant odour. By driving the animals out to seek water, anticoagaulanst reduce the chance of them dying inside the wall and ceiling cavities.
That is what stops the smell inside the walls. It has nothing whatsoever to do with some magical mechanism that desiccates an animal top the point where it won’t decay when it dies, yet allows it to remain alive. Such a concept doesn’t even make any sense. Even if we allow a poison to reduce the moisture content of the body by 20%, there will still be far, far more water than would be required to permit decay at rates undetectable from normal.
Nor is it a slow, slow cruel death. Humans who have been poisoned with these anticoagulants report the effects as unpleasant, but in no sense the slow cruel torture you describe. The worst of the symptoms are akin to a moderate case of stomach flu: stomach pains, distended abdomen, sore joints. Not things you would experience for fun, but not the prolonged torture you describe it as either. Death, when it comes, is quite rapid, being caused by shock which kills within minutes or stroke which is, as in humans, quite painless.
If the mouse you caught had in fact been poisoned by an anticoagulant, an assertion for which there is no evidence, then it was in the same state you were last time you had a stomach flu. It was thirsty and in search of water and feeling disoriented and doubtless in some pain, but it was not in agony.
But we should never let the facts get in the way of emotion and baseless assertion. How can we possibly spread ignorance if we start doing that?
Glue traps work and are effective. They wouldn’t sell them if they weren’t. I have used them. They work quite well when baited with peanut butter.
Every time I see one of these “don’t be cruel to these adorable wittle creatures” threads I just sigh. Because these fucking things are responsible for stuff like the bubonic plague that killed 40% of the European population in the 14th century…they are nasty, their shit is nasty, they smell nasty and are often crawling with nasty things. So while people like you and the OP advocate for some weird notion of a “kindler, gentler machine gun hand”, I say: whatever the fuck works, just get rid of the things.
I don’t advocate torturing them outright, but I don’t give a second thought to their plight when trapped, disposed of, crushed underfoot, whatever. Just kill them all.
They are illegal in many places. Just because they’re still being sold in the US for example doesn’t make them ethically right.
Mice aren’t responsible for that plague, that was the rat flea, and the humans who killed off their natural predators because they were “the devil”. This happened centuries ago, in a time that is completely different from today, where people would shit on the streets dump everything on the street. And even then it’s no excuse to be cruel at all. By your logic it’s acceptable to be cruel to human beings because they spread the Spanish flu which killed more people than the plague did.
Should I be an ass to you because a human from the previous century was responsible for genocide? No. Then why be a cruel ass to a mouse that didn’t even have anything to do with the plague? You call them nasty, but I think your attitude is far more nasty. I think glue traps are far more nasty, simply because of its inherent cruelty. At least a mouse, when it spreads shit, doesn’t intend to cause harm, doesn’t even know it is harmful. But when people like you use a glue trap, you know full well what you’re doing, and how cruel it is.
Yeah, don’t be cruel. Kill them if you have to, but make it as painless as possible. Why induce suffering when you can reduce it? None of this plague rubbish or that they’re nasty is even relevant to that. I’m sure they can be downright nasty in certain situations, but how on earth does that make it OK to be extremely cruel?
What’s weird about killing something in a more humane fashion? About having a little bit of compassion? Starving a creature to death on a glue trap is fucking sick minded, and you’re calling me weird?
The only place upon quick looking that they are illegal is Ireland. Yay for them. So it doesn’t seem like “many places”.
And LOL@ your human vs mouse comparison. Are you really going to go there? Wait, you already did. I have compassion towards humans. I have compassion towards most animals. I have zero compassion for vermin. Yes, I will kill them quickly if I can, sometimes it just doesn’t work out that way.
I don’t lose a moment’s sleep over it. All this hand-wringing is pathetic. Mice still present huge disease problems even today. Did you not read Loach’s link?
Fuck mice, rats and all other disease carrying vermin. I suppose next you will tell me we shouldn’t be experimenting on mice because its cruel.
Nitpick: the more widely accepted figure is 50% of Europe’s population in the Black Death (roughly 33% in the first wave, 50% after four years).
On-topic: I’ve had mice in the house a few times; we captured them and evicted them. In each case, the problem disappeared; it was years before we saw evidence of another mouse. I don’t know if we headed of a terrible infestation by swift eviction, or just got lucky. But I see no reason to be cruel. A disturbing number of these responses seem to really be about what’s convenient for the human, not what’s right.
What’s wrong with conveniently (and quickly, and effectively) dispatching mice? Attaching these moral platitudes to a creature that has limitless capacity for breeding and spreading disease just seems weird to me. They are the ants of the animal kingdom. Again, I am not talking about catching them and then slowly torturing them to death. My ex wife owns a snake. She feeds it mice. They do not die rapidly, and they are in obvious pain and terror. Does that make it cruel? I don’t like to watch them get eaten. But its what snakes eat!
But glue traps work, and I don’t care what PETA or Ireland thinks about them.
They’re illegal in some European countries too. I know that they are outlawed in Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. Laws pertaining to animal cruelty are very similar across Europe. They are also illegal in New Zealand.
It’s a barbaric practice and these bans are proof of such recognition.
It is not a human-mouse comparison.
You’re essentially saying it’s OK to be extremely cruel to an animal just because it might have a disease. I have pointed out why that is flawed. Just because something might have a disease, or its ancestors did something “bad”, doesn’t mean it’s OK to treat the species with extreme cruelty. That is my point. That you’ve missed said point, is hardly surprising.
And you do have compassion for ‘vermin’, because you recognise the need to kill quickly (ie. preventing unnecessary suffering). These animals are at your mercy, how you deal with them says a lot. I don’t care if you’re compassionate for humans, for all I know that only might mean friends and family. I’m sure violent criminals are ‘compassionate’ too towards some humans.
So are you truly compassionate, or only when it suits you?
So? That isn’t an argument for excessive cruelty to these animals. Oh wowee it has disease, ok. That’s a reason to exterminate them, but not a reason for the pointless cruelty. Disease doesn’t come into this at all, because I’m not talking about extermination and culling per se, but the methods employed.
Fuck your attitude. You’re one of the reasons why I hate people, because they’ll make any excuse under the sun to justify being a jerkwad. If anything you’re the disease carrying vermin.
As for animal experimentation, that’s an entirely different topic. I am for it if it saves lives, but if you’ve ever worked in a lab before, you’ll realise there’s many loops and hurdles to go through before even getting permission. The animals are treated better than most pets, any procedure involving pain is minimised. It’s a heavily regulated industry.
Jeeze Louise… Well - even though I do not abide letting rodents live in my house and will kill them any way necessary - I do endorse the Havaheart traps. We went out and bought one last year to deal with all the groundhogs (well that’s what I call them - they are not really groundhogs - those chunky hole-digging rodents that eat your garden? what are they… Woodchucks? Anywhoo). Extremely effective at catching them - this spring so far we’ve caught over a dozen - yes that’s right, a dozen - from our yard and the vacant lot across the street.
Then of course, we either shoot them or drown them. Luckily, both are quick ways of dying so I guess I pass the no cruelty to rodents test, right? What do I win?
Besides which, what the hell are you going to do with a dozen varmints? Release them at someone else’s house? Now THAT…would be evil.