You can pick the peppers when they are green. In fact, they will likely be hotter than they will when they are ripe. You essentially trade heat and a nice, fresh green flavor for a milder, more complex-rich one later. The hot oils are basically there to prevent anything with molars from eating the pepper. Birds, strangely enough, can eat all they want and are not affected. They tend to dribble a lot when they eat, and have a tendency to pass whole seeds through their digestive tract. Mice, on the other hand, would crush those seeds until they were quite dead and useless for reproduction.