Ideally you'd be completely right. A professional with a rifle is far safer with less chance for unintended consequences (even if the chances are low regardles

Ideally you'd be completely right. A professional with a rifle is far safer with less chance for unintended consequences (even if the chances are low regardless). Also incredibly expensive compared to what amounts to a spring-loaded poison trap (someone else in this thread linked the actual manual for the thing). Given that nobody wants to pay what it'd cost to do invasive/native species control with a fleet of professionals shooting things one at a time (even for species where that's theoretically an option), worse alternatives are often used.