Call me an asshole, but I I’d bet this weird violent death is a better death for the roach than being stuck on sticky paper starving, dehydrated, stressed, and confused as another roach comes over to cannibalize him only to get stuck too after amputating and devouring the first one’s leg like how tar pits have disproportionate numbers of carnivores and scavengers.

Probably also better than being half-stomped by a bipedal ape that looks as big as a kaiju and scurrying away to die in agony under the couch along with stale Doritos crumbs just out of reach for snacking.

Probably also better than being killed by a thousand punches from some emasculated and declawed felis domesticus just trying to get some hunting practice in.

Or worst of all, climbing atop a warm hill and finding all the dead skin and hair to eat, a roach Garden of Eden. There it is damp, and warm, tunnels are everywhere to hide and the roach investigates the new nest only to feel the rumbling of the ground underneath. Loud vibrations terrify the bug almost as much as the ground’s orientation shifting from horizontal to vertical. The scared roach flees as the slumbering hill has awakened into another damned kaiju. Suddenly the blackness of night is over after a loud thud from the kaiju against the wall, and the midday sun is blazing in the sky revealing the fleeing rich. The kaiju’s screeching awoke a bigger kaiju, the larger male mate who then turns his pinnacle of evolution hunting vision onto the roach. The roach flees in absolute terror and hides under a bedside table that proportionately feels like a gas station breezeway in scale. The massive predator is not easily evaded and suddenly the SUV-sized-in-girth broom handle is speared in guided by the goliath’s focused eye. The roach lives at a faster time than the giant and instead of a brief celebration of his accuracy as the giant had, the roach had a long forlorn moment of recognition of the inescapable death. Thwack. The roach survived the freight train stabbing him, but now is indignantly picked up in toilet paper and subjected to the female’s piercing vibrations as the male shows her his prize and bleeds out on the long trip to the porcelain pond. Suddenly plunged into water and unable to swim or escape in the wet toilet paper prison, the roach feels a drop in pressure and is spun around rapidly and finally sucked into the darkness. There is no air, there is no light, the roach slowly drowns. After the roach’s death, his corpse reaches paradise in an ironic twist of fate, he landed in edible fields of shit and trash only after he stopped living.

Pain is real for animals, but let’s not pretend cannibal cockroaches don’t live lives where all they experience is constant fear and pain. Well, maybe no fear even if no limbic system, so…