When New Yorkers concern themselves with rodents, they typically focus on how to kill them. But a new law proposed in Albany this month aims to protect them from a long-used extermination method now increasingly seen as unduly cruel, even to a rat: trapping them with glue until they starve, die of dehydration or are dispatched by hand.
The bill would ban the sale and use of what are known as glue boards — cheap, sticky traps that can be strewed around construction sites or tossed under kitchen cabinets and forgotten. If the legislation is successful, New York would join two other places that passed bans recently: Scotland, which in February banned the traps, and Ojai, a city in California with a population of about 7,500, which banned glue traps this month. In January, Representative Ted W. Lieu, a Democrat who represents Los Angeles, introduced the Glue Trap Prohibition Act in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Those pushing for the ban cite the trap’s gruesome method, the fact that other small animals — like songbirds and kittens — can become ensnared, and the risk of stuck rodents spreading disease.
“If you want an animal dead, there are lots of ways to do it, and torturing an animal to death isn’t the answer,” said Assemblyman Harvey Epstein, a Democrat who represents Manhattan’s East Side and who sponsored the bill in the State Assembly. “We don’t need to lose our humanity just because we don’t like having as many rodents in our midst as we currently do.”
But the bill’s detractors, including those who work in the pest-control industry and New Yorkers who have had one too many of the creatures scuttle past their ankles, say it’s misguided sympathy. A glue-trap ban doesn’t stop rats and mice from meeting other brutal ends from poison bait or spring-loaded snap traps.
“A lot of people who don’t actually have to face rats, mice, all these types of disgusting creatures, have a lot of opinions about them,” said Sam Liebowitz, who works at National Pest and Exterminators Supplies, a Brooklyn-based company that sells a variety of rodent-control methods, including poisons that work by causing the animal to bleed to death internally. “Glue boards aren’t fun, but there are so many things that are more cruel.”
Mr. Liebowitz added: “I’m not saying I want to be on a glue board — I don’t, and neither do you — but it is one of those really misplaced pieces of kindness.”
A glue-trap design was first patented in 1980, but versions of the device have been available before that, according to pest control experts. They frequently catch animals other than their target. Over the past decade, Edward E. Clark Jr., the president of the Wildlife Center of Virginia, has helped document 179 different species of animal that have become mired in the traps nationwide, via the center’s WILD ONe database, which collects information from wildlife rehabilitation and animal hospitals, including some protected species of birds.
A hotline run by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a nonprofit animal advocacy group, often receives calls from people desperate to unstick critters from such traps. “Many of the callers set the trap themselves,” said Jakob Shaw, a special projects manager at PETA. “But then when they see what glue traps do to animals, they are so horrified.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns against using glue traps, because of possible exposure to a trapped animal’s urine, which can carry disease like hantavirus. In New York, some places already bar their use, including John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia Airports, some of the more than 100 airports that began banning them over concerns about pathogens about six years ago, following a PETA campaign.
“These specific types of traps can be vectors for diseases,” said State Senator Jabari Brisport, a Democrat from Brooklyn who sponsored the bill in the State Senate. “There is a public health angle in addition to the abject cruelty.” Senator Brisport and others urged a different plan of attack, like targeting the food sources of rodents by containerizing trash bags, or patching holes in homes so they can’t slip in.
But for some in New York City, which is infested with some two million rats, a problem so insidious that the mayor last year appointed a rat czar to tackle the issue, the thought of eliminating a method to control rats — or even caring about the things — beggared belief.
At Mega Building Supply on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, glue boards are still the most popular trap, said Brandon Woodruff, the manager, for one reason: They’re cheap. “People need a solution,” Mr. Woodruff said. “Either way, I don’t think there is any New Yorker who really cares if rats and mice die. Nobody wants them around.”
