I can't hurt a fly ... but a roach is gonna get it

Before I moved to NYC (the potential capital of the cockroach world) I couldn't kill any animals, at all. Well, except for the mosquito but that I justified with the fact that I was acting in "self-defense".
When I moved to New York I thus saw myself in a little situation called pest infestation. The mice (in my first apartment) weren't allowed to be killed by gruesome glue-traps, or the old-fashioned snappy thing. So Dario got a "humane" trap, which threw the mouse into another locked compartment with air-holes. Unfortunately, the mice would come back after Dario would throw them out the window (which, by the way, didn't seem to bother them even though we were up in the 3rd floor). The reason we could identify them as the same mice is because Dario began tagging them with white-out [for my non-American friends: that's Tipex]. The fact that I was feeding them during their entrapment probably wasn't helping.
One day, we caught eleven mice ...and that was the day I decided to get a cat. It worked within a week. The mice were gone.
The roaches, however, stayed. And even though we are now in a mice-free apartment we never got rid of the roaches. No matter where we lived.
I don't know when it happened but I have now put those darn roaches on my black-list with the only other animal I'd kill (the mosquito). I always apologize, for I still feel bad since my motive isn't really any of "survival".

I always wonder about the intelligence of these animals. They know exactly when they're safe or in danger. They seize you up more like mammals than insects. ...(wait, is a roach an insect? yeah, it's in the beetle family, right?) They stretch their little antennas at you to see what you're going to do next and they play this little daredevil game with you. They're propably well aware that it's really hard to kill them. They can withstand unbelievable amounts of household spray, and if you hit them with anything that's not exactly flat, chances are they'll live. And if you've ever swept up a roach you thought was dead you might have encountered their sudden body-bounciness. It's scary.