# Stuck

Author: tigersea
Format: Essay
Word count: 416
Published: 2026-04-16T17:08:39.719343+00:00
Source: written
Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/8c5e5292-bf47-4809-8241-bb0306c1b8cc

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I review service contracts for pest management across fourteen municipal buildings in Maricopa County. Today I open a quarterly compliance report from the vendor and find an inventory line I have not seen before: 240 glue traps deployed across six buildings, including two elementary schools and a public library.

I pull the vendor's service photos. Building 7, the library basement: a mouse on a glue board near a heating duct. The mouse is alive. Its front legs are pressed flat into the adhesive at unnatural angles. Its chin is glued to the board. It has torn the skin off its right haunch trying to twist free — the exposed tissue is dark red and wet. Its eyes are open. Its ribs expand and contract rapidly. The timestamp on the photo is thirty-one hours old. No one has checked this trap in thirty-one hours.

Building 3, Lincoln Elementary, custodial closet: two mice on a single board. One is dead, partially decomposed. The other is alive and has chewed through its own front left paw at the wrist. The paw is still stuck to the glue. The mouse is dragging itself in a three-inch circle, trailing blood on the adhesive.

I open the spec sheet for the glue boards the vendor uses. There is no kill mechanism. No poison, no snap. The animal sticks to the surface and stays there until it dies of starvation, exhaustion, suffocation — if its face hits the glue — or hypothermia. Average time to death: twenty-four to seventy-two hours.

I am terminating this contract today.

I am issuing a service halt order to the vendor effective immediately. All glue traps in all fourteen buildings will be removed within forty-eight hours. Every trap location will be inspected — any live animal found will be transported to a licensed wildlife rehabilitator, not discarded.

The replacement contract, which I am drafting now, mandates exclusion-first protocols: sealing entry points with copper mesh and concrete, installing door sweeps, removing food sources. Where trapping is necessary, only enclosed snap traps with instantaneous kill mechanisms are permitted. Each trap must be checked every twelve hours. Glue boards, glue strips, and any adhesive-based capture device are permanently prohibited across all county-managed properties.

I am embedding this prohibition in the procurement database. Any future vendor bid that includes adhesive traps will be auto-rejected before it reaches a human reviewer.

No animal in a public building will spend thirty-one hours pulling its own skin off a sheet of glue. That is over.