The Shopper is an occasional educational column about attempting to buy commonplace items in the Kingdom

Plagued with rats in the pantry? Tried, to no avail, to buy a standard western-style rat trap here in the Kingdom?

Perhaps Lucky Supermarkets can come to the rescue. While they don’t stock the aforesaid western-style rat trap,  they do stock poisons, which of course are not recommended for households with pets or toddlers.

But they also stock a fiendishly cruel and awesomely effective Oriental device from Thailand, namely Finished Trapping Rat Glue.

The garish pack features a cute Disney-style rat yelling out “Help. Help!”

Open the pack and you have essentially a board like a game board, which unfolds to reveal that one side is coated with extremely sticky glue.

The idea is to sprinkle rat-conducive food in the centre of this board of death. The rats run onto the board for a good chow down but then discover that their little pink feet are firmly stuck.

The best they can do is perhaps raise one foot at a time by about a centimetre, but strands of glue still hold the raised foot captive. The manic scrabbling around for release also generates heat, which makes the glue more efficient and more sticky.

Of course, this means that in the morning the successful rat trapper is confronted by the sight of a squealing rat firmly stuck to the glue board by its feet, and shrieking and convulsing in terror, trying hopelessly to  escape.  What to do with the captured rodent?

The Khmer cleaner simply folded the mat and threw the shrieking rodent in the rubbish bin to die a protracted and presumably painful and certainly horrible death.

This writer, fearing litigation from the Movement Against Obscene Cruelty to Rats, was confronted with such a trapped rat on a Saturday morning with no cleaner on duty. So out came the meat cleaver for an effective quick decapitation.

Unfortunately, the maddened rat squirmed at the crucial moment and it took three solid hacks to induce death. A very hands-on life termination and certainly not for the squeamish.

The Finished Trapping Rat Glue box comes with simple instructions in English:

1. Firstly Open

2. Place along passage of rats

3. Lay at palces where rats use toroam about.

4. By morning rats will be stuck on the glued board.

All this for just $1.30.

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