dRats

Before. Food in the middle. Glue surrounding it.

After - 5 very stuck rats

Lately we've been discovering holes in our bread bag with slices of bread half eaten, nibbles off our apples and chunks out of our bananas which are left on top of our cupboard. We'd seen glimpses of mice or rats in our house a couple of times so we were certain of our culprits. I'd heard Thais using some sticky glue like substance on boards to catch such vermin from my father-in-law when he used to live in Thailand. So I went to the hardware store and advised him that I had rats in my house, do you have that you can catch rats with and sure enough he took me to the part of shop with a tin of rat glue and plastic dish to put it on.
I thought there was perhaps one or two rats at moments. I laid the dish out overnight and this morning I was horrified to see 5 rats stuck to the board which was under the cupboard. One more rat was caught upstairs in the boy's room.
As Buddhists, most Thais will not kill any animals, even rats. The glue gets around this problem because they are not technically the ones killing the animals. They'll starve to death because they are stuck to the board, but their conscience is clear because they didn't kill it. It starved. A bit arbitrary some might argue in the West.
How do you get rid of a snake if it is in your building? You catch the snake and then tie it by its tail from the ceiling and then let it starve to death.