Killing Pest

[rossoneri]

I think first of all you should store up the food properly and keep the temple in a hygienic condition. We should always do the necessary in oder to avoid committing such a heavy negative karma. What is done is done and if i may, you can have a special prayer and dedicate it to the rats and yourself too. Remember our karma will not stop developing, example is like a snowball rolling down from a hill and eventually it'll become bigger. Now its up to us whether we want the snowball to develop into negative karma or positive one. Its entirely up to us from now on.

[Positive Change]

As a Buddhist we should always refrain from killing especially if it is knowingly. As some of you have shared here, prevention is always better than the "cure". In this case, the word "cure" is really inappropriate!

We have to be mindful to keep our temples, homes etc clean and tidy. Keep food stored away in proper air tight containers. Make sure we do not expose food to temp rodents, pest and the like to our premises and that should eliminate the problem of having to deal with pests to begin with.

However, if we have not been doing that and we do have a pest problem, we need to address it before it actually gets worse. Worse meaning, the population of the pest may increase and we may end up killing more lives. One could say, the best thing to do is move away... well, to that I would say absolutely NO. Why? Because we created the situation so do not let someone else clean up the mess. The karma will still come back to us. We do not have to be participating in the actual killing for the karma to be created especially so in this scenario.

So if it has come to the point of having to kill in order to ensure the problem does not escalate, extensive Medicine Buddha pujas, Vajrasattva pujas need to be done to purify the karma preceding the action of killing the poor pests. However they too are not without their karmic debt. There is a reason why they have come to this conclusive situation too...

Killing pest is never the ideal situation but sometimes the lesser of two evils prevails and we have to choose one that creates the least possible suffering and negative karma. I think this applies to everything we do and hence we call it a practice.

[Jessie Fong]

The majority of the shops surrounding my work place are in the F&B business.  Due to their lack of proper hygiene and upkeep of their shops, rats and cockroaches have a field day.  We can see huge rats running around the drains, stealing left-over food and bringing these back to their nests.  We also see cockroaches scuttling from every crack in the building and drains, leaving their droppings everywhere.

One day I had the misfortune to park my car near the food outlet, only to find small cockroaches inside my car the morning after. 

At such locations, how do we get rid of these pests without killing them?

[montymonkey123]

Rats will give people who come diseases so you should get the rats out of your temple so that the people who come will not get harmed. If you are going to kill them, please do a puja for the rats and dedicate for the rats to have a good and swift rebirth. Thank you.

[Tammy]

However, before we exterminate, it is essential to do a Medicine Buddha puja to dedicate to the pests followed by recitation of many Vajrasattva mantras to purify our act of killing.

Dear Klein,

Referring to your suggestion above, i would like to point out that this can only be the LAST resort of dealing with pest control. It is very dangerous if everyone thinks it is OK to kill because we can just perform puja dedicating to the doomed pests and recite a few malas of Vajrasattva mantras to purify our act of killing. Thereby indirectly encouraging killing.

There most be a reason behind the phrase 'pest control'. Meaning the act of preventing pests is very important, rather than creating an environment for them to multiple. It is like leaving our doors ajar all night and later blame the thief for coming in to steal !