Rats caught on camera hunting flying bats (2025)(scienceclock.com) |
Rats caught on camera hunting flying bats (2025)(scienceclock.com) |
Rats are the best! :)
Conservation-minded management practice is often to build a "bat friendly" gate at the entrance of a significant bat cave or an abandoned mine portal. These gates are the ideal perch for hungry raccoons to pluck bats right out of the air. Bats emerge from entrances like this near the ceiling, when possible, specifically to avoid predators. Poorly designed gates are the opposite of "bat friendly" and turn the safe entrances into buffets for raccoons.
Why do we care about protecting bats? They're the #1 predator for night-flying insects, which are often crop destroying pests. Every bat we lose equals more chemical pesticide that farmers must use to efficiently grow crops.
I don't like rats, and I don't really even have a huge issue with killing them, but I certainly don't want to torture them. If I had used a snap trap, the rat would be dead in about a second. With the glue trap he was suffering for hours, probably in immense pain.
I don't think rats are cute anymore and I'm not sure that glue traps should be legal.
We had to replace all our food containers with very thick plastic containers or glass containers, and after the disaster with the glue traps we hired an exterminator who patched up all the holes they were getting in from and laid a lot of snap traps, which as far as I can tell, killed them immediately and thus they didn't suffer.
I'll admit that I don't really love the idea of killing mammals; but I do love my house staying together.
Some people pointed out on the other thread that the rat would be near blind, but they also have excellent hearing and sense of smell to work around that.