Only a few days ago I clicked into a program where an officer was trying to describe how close a misidentified object had been to him: "If it had been a planet that close I would have been sunburned."  He's on a planet (how close can you get?) and the planet, not being a nuclear ball, isn't causing a sunburn; I hate to smack him in the face, et al, but, if another planet gets 'that close', a sunburn is far from the immediate concern.

Quite agree... leave them alone in a deep pit in the Arctic or Antarctica... I do not outright hate them but I'm not particularly inclined towards having them, it being unintentionally, underfoot; the pit can be shared with an ample supply of all of the rodents transported from a hundreds-of-miles radius around me (except the bats, as long as they are intelligent enough not to abode about my dwelling or smack into me as I bicycle, as has been done).

hyperpep111 wrote on Oct 15^th, 2011 at 7:32am:
It was, however, the rodent's choice to invade the human habitat and, ignorantly or not, they crawl into contact with all sorts of contaminants. They are also as capable as any other species (more so than some) to provide their own housing in the wild (even 'house' mice -- I've seen it).
This is not the first time rodents, mostly mice, have invaded my residence. I have personally warned mice that being inside in my presence foreboded their doom; that has been proven many times. Unfortunately, I did not perceive the crack in the storage container holding my phonographs prior to the hurricane (Irene; neither was it alone in flooding my entryway). A nest was made in the old Garand and mice like to cover their surroundings with personal 'fertilizer'. As hard and dry as it usually is, more than ample water transforms this fertilizer into a great murk. Add to that the fact that mice are cannibalistic, even mother mice when the nest is threatened, so guess what can happen when the water rises in a mouse-housing container -- the crack at the bottom now closed in by the aforementioned murk. Fozzer needn't remind me that it's a nasty old do-do. My BSR infrared autochanger has been heavily hosed and sprayed with a combination of disinfectant over a period of many days; it will be much, much, much longer in the drying out period before another spraying of disinfectant finally enables closer inspection and testing; no guarantees.

Pertaining to a recent report on the descendant strain of the Black Death, if I recall correctly, it still kills a couple thousand people per year. Weed it and reap.