I work at a nature center where we have a few tanks of feeder mice. Every once in awhile I run into one that needs to be put out of its misery (huge gaping holes into its intestines, etc), wich I am for in theory. My problem is I have a really hard time killing anything in almost any situation. With a mercy killing, my ethics certainly do not get in the way because I want to end the pain of the animal. However we don't have euthinasia shots for mice, and they are "put to sleep" by savagely bashing their heads into the concrete, something I just cannot bring myself to do. I've gotten around doing it so far (by making others do it for me), but I don't know what I'd do if I was there by myself.

Am I the only one here who would find it incredibly difficult to do this (I think because of how brutal it is, mostly), or is it just me? What would you guys do?

I certainly couldn't do it. I'm not sure I could even bring myself to administer a euthanasia shot, but at least that's more humane than killing the mice any other way. :(

You are not the only one who feels this way, there is no way that I could bring myself to do that. That is a hard thing to do, and nobody should be able to do it so easily, without thinking about the mice and the pain they are suffering when they go through that. I would be doing just what you are doing, and have others do it for me.

I couldn't/wouldn't do it. It's one of the reasons I couldn't be a vet.

I just mentioned in another post that I once tried to get myself to drop a rock on a praying mantis which was dying but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. It's such an awful neccesity of dealing with animals. The other day my Uncle (who's a dairy farmer) had to euthanise a cow who had cancer. He got the vet out and they took a sample and she did indeed have cancer. So he shot her, he was really upset about it. It's funny, he sends cows to the sale and to the works, and he sends bobby (veal) calves off to die (they're killed straight away in New Zealand. But he still has a hard time killing his cows himself. It's like out of sight, out of mind.

Yeah.. I've heard it said of one of my bosses that she defines cruelty based on how much it bothers her personally, not the effect on the animal (the one it really matters).

They also control population there by making "kill chambers" with dry ice. I find that unnecessarily cruel, because it is rediculous how many tanks of mice we have, when compared to the number of mice our animals actually eat a week (maybe 10?). If we only had one or two tanks, we'd keep up to the breeding cycle much more easily.