Animal traps

[GavinM]

It puzzles me why people are particularly sadistic and/or mean when it comes to this.

See, I have no problem with something like a standard mouse trap. They're cheap, effective and are designed to kill the animal instantaneously, which happens most of the time.

But what do glue traps do?

To spare you the gory details, they are, in a word: torturous. They're also incredibly unsanitary, and give opportunity for the animal to escape - either by the glue being too weak to hold it, or the animal gnawing a part of itself off.

Yet some misguided people think this is humane. Bollocks. The sadistic part is that they are meant to be "throw-away traps", even if the creature is still alive on it! Yes, people will throw it into the garbage as the animal will starve to death, like an inanimate object. After all, this is what the instructions on the back of the package tell people to do. That pisses me off the most.

I don't mind the killing part (let's not kid ourselves, we have to sometimes) but the torture bit does unsettle me, and I hate it. And the people who do it. If you have to kill, do it as quickly and as painlessly as possible. In these situations sometimes I wish I had the power to convert the creature's pain into the minds of the perpetrator, so they can feel some of it. That'll teach them to be douchebags - if any of you ever seen the movie Powder, you'll know what I mean.

[Boneman]

There has to be some reckoning somewhere - at least, that's what I hope.

Attributed to Lord Bishop of Manchester, in a debate about vivisection in the House of Lords: "My Lords, I have heard it said - and the saying has haunted me ever since - that if animals believed in the devil, he would look remarkably like a human being."