True story: I once built cartoon-style mouse trap out of a box, with a stick holding it up and a piece of string attached to the stick, the whole thing baited with peanut butter on a cracker. We had a mouse loose in our office, and rather than let engineering come along with their horrific glue traps, we thought we would live trap it and take it down the road to be another office building’s problem. It was straight out of a cartoon, with me holding the other end of the string, patiently waiting for our rodent to take the bait. When he finally shot out from under a desk and made for the peanut butter, I was so startled I leapt in the air, possibly honking “MOTHER!” yanking the string as I did. The trap slammed down onto the floor, the mouse long gone, cracker in paw. Probably a good thing that he got away, as we had not really thought past the victorious moment that our cartoon trap worked, to the part where we had to lift the trap up.
I tell you this story as a cautionary tale, just in case any of your are thinking of building one of these:
Sure it looks fool proof, but you never know what your intended victim is going to do that will make you scream for your mother.