d-Con 'No view, No Touch' Mouse Trap: Sterile Inhumanity

The plight of the Galgo dogs - tortured and abused by Spanish hunters - is a grisly insight into just how vile humanity can knowingly be.

But on the other end of the spectrum, it's remarkable how humanity can sanitise doing 'inhumane' things. Call me old fashioned, but I believe mankind should only be allowed to do the dirty jobs if they're willing to get their hands dirty.

Take, for example, the d-Con 'No View, No Touch' mouse trap.

It's a little black disk - about the size of a hockey puck - that you place in your home or garage. Delicious bait attracts a curious mouse and then 'snap!'

Off goes mouse to the heavenly hereafter and into the bin goes the 'No View, No Touch' mouse trap. The homeowner never needs to see or touch the victim of their trap.

Which to me, seems abhorrent.

Not the killing of the mouse - not by any means. Mice are pesky little things that spread disease and nibble through your grain sacks. If you've got a mouse-in-the-house, killing it is a lot more effective than sending it an eviction notice.

But if you're willing to muster up the courage to kill another living creature, for God's sake take responsibility for it. Be willing to look your crushed prey in the eye as you prise it's mangled corpse out of the mousetrap. Understand that you're responsible when your tomcat goes slinking past with a muffled 'mrrreeeeooow' and a length of tail hanging from between it's chops.


There's something intrinsically wrong about killing another living creature without ever having to see it or touch it. If the thought of a mouse-corpse makes you so squeamish, you've got no right killing them.

It's this 'sanitised' inhumanity that's behind a lot of life's problems at the moment.

Like how we all gaily munch our chicken nuggets, neatly ignoring the battery farming process that supplies us with our meat. Or how we feed our cows reconstituted beef-products, covering our eyes and pretending we're not really forcing herbivores into cannibalism.

Humanity has removed itself so far from the grisly realities of life that we can no longer truly accept responsibility for what we do. We can commit atrocities, but remain blissfully, deliberately detached from them so we don't have to deal with the moral consequences of our actions.

Which is totally, horribly wrong.

It's this kind of thinking that led the Nazi's to the 'final solution.' All those cheerful Germans wanted to end the 'Jewish problem,' so they handed it over to Adolf Hitler. He started the death camps and gas ovens and began the most horrific genocide in human history.

And the people of Germany, who knew nothing of the death camps and tactfully didn't ask what happened to their Jewish neighbours, reaped the benefits of their 'solution' without having to deal with the grisly fact that they were complicit in the greatest mass murder ever.

If every German civilian had been handed a shovel and a gas-mask and told to 'do their bit,' then the Holocaust would never have happened. The essential goodness of humanity would have won out and people would have been disgusted with what they were being asked to do.

But if you don't ask - and nobody tells you - it's remarkable how much inhumanity an essentially 'good' person can play their part in.

Maybe it's a long shot, trying to connect a 'No View, No Touch' mouse trap to the Holocaust - but it's the same mentality behind them both. Exercising control over life and death is a responsibility - and unless we're willing to get our hands dirty, we shouldn't have that right.

If you're going to go head-to-snout with an errant mouse - at least be a man about it. The 'No-View, No Touch' mousetrap is just cowardly.