creepy crawlers

so we have a slight mouse/lizard problem. nothing we can't handle with a little sticky paper, some easy cheese and a bit of patience. below is a poor critter we caught the first night of trapping. number 5 of 6.i don't mind killing things, especially pests that could be carrying diseases... but killing something completely immobilized seems a bit borderline serial killer (at least that's where they usually start out).

during the past few weeks we found mice digging in our care packages and the wall lockers that hold our mres. so to solve the problem we got these sticky traps... which if you want to kill something in our building you go to the life support office... irony!
anyway... within no time we had a mouse and while i tried to figure out how to dispose of it (usually a plan you come up with prior to setting a trap... and most people suggested we take it outside and "stomp" it then remove the body... can you say yuck?) another smart rodent found itself stuck to the same trap. rutherford and i thought we should document the incident so we videotaped ourselves "releasing" the mice back into the wild. it was pretty funny. we threw sand on the trap to nullify the stickiness and then shook it until the mice fell off. before they were fully free though the larger of the two started to attack the small one. it was pretty hilarious especially on tape because i started yelling at it to knock it off and stop eating his buddy.

when we returned from our sand safari we caught another one, which we released in a similar manner. and then we found yet another one right away on another trap. not the smartest creatures.

in total we caught 6 but we've heard at least one more. but it has thus far been able to resist the temptation of easy cheese. i can also say that to this date, i can return from iraq having killed zero mice. i may have trained to defend our country from foreign and domestic enemies... but i still won't kill indiscriminately.