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[Noel Fahden/The Daily Pennsylvanian]

Last summer I took a red and black plastic ashtray and used its edge to crush the skull of a mouse. On the first blow, its rear legs twitched and the eye facing me ejected from its socket.

I think the mouse was breathing until the third or fourth strike, when its jaw slackened, revealing teeth, and a mix of blood and brains extended from the remnants of its head, each droplet smaller than the one before it, all of them red and gooey and stuck.

I found the mouse because my housemate, Beth, informed me that we had a dead mouse near a couch in our kitchen and that she would vomit if she had to be the one to trash it.

It was, in fact, not near our couch, but under, and not dead. It was lying on its side, drawing labored breaths, possibly starving and definitely mortally exhausted from its frantic and futile struggle to free itself from the Gotcha Glue Traps placed for the catch and kill by employees of University Enterprises.

There were tufts of gray fur near its body and a small pile of shit just under its ass, the former ripped off during the fight, the latter deposited in progressive moments of terror.

I spent the early moments before sleep that night picturing the mouse's eye (tiny, black, dangling) and front teeth (tight together, in front, the lip above them drawn back and quivering) and contemplating what I hate most about our species.

The conscious, destructive, application of our creative gifts scored first; it might even be alone on the list. I cried watching Cirque du Soleil: a couple dancing in the air on dangling, twirling silk, their movements dizzying, light and flawless like the fabric that floated them, the operatic alto (their accompaniment) heavy, full and perfect, a voice that might cave in your chest at any moment, were it and your chest so inclined.

But a glue trap is none of these things. It is a calculated measure of murder, ingeniously simple -- just white, with a small drawing of a cartoon mouse and casual instructions telling the consumer to "dispose after use." The glue shines when fresh, and I've heard that it gives off an odor engineered to please the rodent's neurons. To deploy, one simply places it along a mouse's usual commute -- against walls, near fridges and cabinets, under sofas, etc. -- and waits for either visual confirmation of success or the rising stink of rot.

I imagine that the vast majority of people, finding a still breathing patch of gray on the interrupted sticky sheen, twist their lips in disgust and hasten their bounty to the nearest outdoor disposal unit, where the mouse will die slowly of shock, internal hemorrhaging or hunger. If God sees fit to grace the dying with a last minute piece of luck, the ants and their ilk won't make the big discovery until after the mouse's brain has ceased to function.

What I have problems seeing is the point. Mice are harmless. They shit in significant quantities as they move and make irritating scrunching noises in the walls, but these are not prerequisites for execution; they are merely evolutionary advantages that homo sapiens did not require.

If a pair of mice has inhabited your house, it is likely that they are feeding primarily on the trash you've left sitting out and picking through your inedible refuse to soften the nest they are shaping for the birth and comfort of their children.

But we choose to kill them. And the most effective and cheapest method employed by the campus realtors and the larger part of the mouse-killing population involves an excruciating, twitching death.

You might argue that my issue with the matter stems from a childhood memory: a mouse that my mother caught on an earlier manifestation of such mechanisms. It struggled and screeched as my horrified and guilt-ridden parents pushed at it with a butter knife, attempting to free it but succeeding only in severing its limbs at the joints.

But I think my reaction is more than that; a general repulsion with casually inflicting needless death. When did we start to think that the earth was our, and solely our, domain? When was it decided that the unused nannies and crooks of our living spaces were off-limits to everything but us, that a brief flash of fur and the click of a tiny scurry were intolerable sensations, that little holes in the garbage cans couldn't be had, that life itself was a force we should be expected to contain?

Mine was a mercy killing. What's your excuse?

Dan Kaplan is a senior History major from New York City.

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