Those pieces of furniture are glorified fly and mousetraps (really really cool ones...), why is the author of this article so disturbed by them? Personally I would find the idea that my house has enough mice to keep my coffee-table well-fed far more disturbing than my coffee-table eating mice.
The coffeetable doesn't strike me as practical but I could see an insect-eating lamp being useful outside.
You'd probably have the same issue as most "bug zappers" do, namely that they kill more beneficial insects than harmful/annoying ones, but perhaps it could be tuned to kill mosquitoes? A mosquito-killer that powered itself (and didn't require propane or CO2 or electricity, as most current ones do) would be pretty cool.
Well, if you could somehow get more energy out of it then maybe you'd be able to get it to preform some other tasks. Of course there aren't many tasks a coffee-table might preform, and there certainly aren't (enough? D:) mice in my house to keep it fed, but the idea is sound enough.
Perhaps some sort of fancy bird-feeder that eats squirrels...
The mousetrap table disturbs me. They've got a right to make and sell it, but I won't buy or condone it. That's because it causes too much pain on the animal's part, with not enough gain on the human's. Just look at another, more detailed picture of the design: http://dvice.com/archives/2009/02/mousetrap-table.php Clearly, this thing goes beyond a sensible mousetrap, which is something that acts quickly and is not designed to celebrate death.
Before you start to think that I'm some kind of nutty animal rights/eco person, I should say this: animal research makes human life better (by making us more knowledgeable about all kinds of things, from neurophysiology to pharmaceuticals to cosmetics), and they usually get anesthesia while we're doing it. I'm all for that. Likewise, eating (large, edible) animals is awesome because they taste good, improving the human gain enough to justify killing them.
But powering furniture with mice? It's legal (and must remain so, or we lose the legal right to use animals for the aformentioned proper uses), but not ethical.
What do you think of people who keep pitcher plants in their homes? The larger ones trap cockroaches, small lizards, and even mice in a slippery sap, slowly digesting them over the course of days.
But the pitcher plant does not draw the line. If there are mice in your house (or outside, if it's tropical enough that the pitcher plant can survive outside) a large enough pitcher plant will eat them.
If you maintain that a pitcher plant owner has a moral responsibility to prune back the plant before it gets large enough to eat mice, that's consistent and defensible; I was just curious if the different perspective from a table would bring a different conclusion.
It seems to me that putting the death of an animal or insect on display, as entertainment, is also unethical. I don't like the idea of people cheering for the guillotine.
