Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them

cbc.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 110 posts

Re: Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them

#61

Post by GuB-42 »

chrismeller wrote: post #38
__i___ii____ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100 flies = 1 mouse. However, mosquitos have absolutely no value and can be exterminated to extinction. We could even make it a holiday.

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.

Re: Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them

#63

Post by dev_dull »

brohoolio wrote: post #8

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.

I prefer my cats, which are more cruel than any of the mouse trap styles sold here.

Re: Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them

#64

Post by dev_dull »

onychomys wrote: post #9

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.

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.

Re: Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them

#65

Post by tyingq »

cptskippy wrote: post #60
hombre_fatal wrote: post #52

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.

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 ha…

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.

Re: Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them

#67

Post by 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?

Re: Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them

#68

Post by chrismeller »

GuB-42 wrote: post #61
chrismeller wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I…

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.

Re: Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them

#69

Post by hairofadog »

ourmandave wrote: post #33

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.

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.

Re: Glue traps are cruel, and retailers should be banned from selling them

#70

Post by 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.

Post reply on HN