I'm not sure if I'd call it full-fledged PTSD, but I have some guilt associated with an incident of a rat invasion in my house. We initially used glue traps with the hope that we'd catch the rats and maybe be able to release them outside. What happened instead is that one of the rats was caught, chewed its arm off to escape, bled all over my house, and eventually died.

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.

It's not your fault!! :) you didn't know that would happen if you did you wouldn't have done it. :) So yeah: Those traps should be illegal. I understand why people kill rats, I eat meat, but I appreciate folks who do it as painlessly as they can. I love rats sooooo much, probably irrationally so because they helped me a lot through my parents divorce when I was a wee boy, they're very bonded animals, they accept you in as part of their life and show incredible amounts of affection towards you. On top of that, they're intelligent!

100% agree on banning glue traps. Snap traps aren't perfect though. I had to finish off a mighty survivor of one once. The rat was huge. When I heard the rattling in the shed I panicked and grabbed a shovel lying nearby. My mind has erased the memory of what happened next, I just remember the aftermath and being splattered with lots of rat blood. I deeply regret doing that and wish I had let her limp away to an uncertain fate. I stopped setting traps after that and just let them run rampant through the moldy old walls of that place until I moved.