A genuinely better mousetrap is hard to come up with.
Today’s invention is intended not for domestic use, but for when plagues of rodents descend on stockpiled food resources.
A very large number of rats or mice would be channeled onto a rotating belt. The belt surface would move backwards but still allow rats to make net progress along it.
As this belt moved, it would spin up a generator whose output was wired to metal plates embedded within the belt itself.
This would allow the kinetic energy of a flood of vermin to electrocute a proportion of the running rats, causing their bodies to be discarded (mostly) into a pile at the upstream end.
