It being Sunday, I think of the pastor who got me to join the Methodist church. He retired last summer after 40 years of active ministry. I almost called it service, because in some ways he was always fighting wars.
One time, I found a small field mouse caught in a glue trap in the church kitchen. Still alive.
I told the pastor it was an inhumane, slow way to kill unwanted animals, even mice. Someone had thought glue traps were the answer to building a better mousetrap. I'm no all-life-is-sacred person; I just happened to have heard the Environmental Education Center where my husband worked had banned glue traps.
The pastor agreed but asked me to find all the other traps and throw them out, which I did. Only the one trap had caught anything, half of its body and all four tiny feet, stuck forever. The pastor had put himself through seminary by working as a butcher so I wrongly assumed he could deal with the situation. He wrote an angry note, then washed his hands.
In the end, it was I who had to run the water into a bucket and put the mouse out of its misery by holding it under the water. Until there were no bubbles surfacing.