Rats and Hamsters are gnawing their ways out of confinement

Question

I'm being heavily spammed by these notifications:

• live rat has gnawed its way out of confinement
• live hamster has gnawed its way out of confinement

Well, I'm not interested in having these as pets, I prefer that cats and dogs kill these vermins. But they keep being caught on animal traps, and then escaping.

I know that a solution to the problem is making metal animal traps instead of wooden ones. The problem is that this would make a HUGE stockpile of trapped rats and hamsters, and I don't have any use for them, as the wiki shows they are useless, besides being able to be pe(s)ts.

So:

1. can I do anything profitable with them if I keep them on metal traps?
2. if they are really useless if not used as pets, how can I prevent them from being caught in the first place?

Version: 0.50 (Steam).

Answer 1

Animal traps are for catching vermin: if you don't want to catch vermin, don't make traps. (Catching non-vermin requires a cage, not a trap.)

You already have almost all the important information here: you can fix the "gnawed it's way out" spam with metal cages rather than wood, and the only use for captured rats/hamsters is as pets.

If there are no other vermin on your map that you do specifically want to capture, you should probably just stop setting traps - to answer your question in the comments they are a potentially useful resource, but you've decided you don't want what they provide (i.e. pets).

The other option is to sell them - both rats and hamsters are listed as being worth 10 dwarfbucks, so low-value but not worthless.

My personal suggestion would be to trade your stockpiled captures to the elves, and then giggle at the idea of them getting home and moving dozens (or more) of rats to wooden cages.

The truly dwarfy solution is of course a massively overcomplicated magma-powered automated defensive rat-cannon; the design of which I leave as an exercise for the reader...