Home Depot to Face Probe Over Glue Trap Sales at Annual Meeting

For Immediate Release:
May 18, 2022

Contact:
Robin Goist 202-483-7382

When The Home Depot holds its virtual annual shareholder meeting tomorrow, PETA will be there to ask the company to stop selling glue traps, which take days to kill animals from starvation, suffocation, or blood loss. The retailer banned the use of glue traps in its stores in 2017 after a store manager discovered a live mouse convulsing on a glue trap, and PETA is calling on it to end its sale of the devices, too.

“Small animals die agonizing deaths on glue traps every day, in part because The Home Depot makes it so easy to buy them,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA is calling on The Home Depot to help stop this egregious suffering by removing the vile traps from its shelves.”

Glue traps ensnare wildlife—including rodents and even birds who get stuck in the adhesive—who frantically rip out their own fur or feathers, chew off their own limbs, and break their bones while struggling to escape before succumbing to shock, dehydration, asphyxiation, or blood loss. Glue traps also fail as a long-term solution because they don’t address the source of the problem: As long as food remains available, more animals will move in to take the place of those who have been killed.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to abuse in any way”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview that fosters violence against other animals. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

PETA’s shareholder question follows.

My name is Laura Shields, and I’m here on behalf of PETA. For more than 15 years, PETA has urged The Home Depot to stop selling abhorrent glue traps—boards coated with an extremely strong adhesive intended to immobilize animals. Animals panic in the glue, struggle, and even resort to ripping their skin or chewing their limbs off in order to escape. Glue trap manufacturers, including Tomcat, whose traps The Home Depot sells, direct consumers to throw the traps in the garbage, without any regard for the animal’s life. It can take days for the animals to die from blood loss, dehydration, or suffocation. England just banned the use of glue traps because of the extreme cruelty involved.

The Home Depot is keenly aware of all this. After all, it stopped using these vile devices after an employee witnessed a mouse suffering on a glue trap inside one of its stores. The pain caused by these devices is the same—inside or outside the stores.

PETA’s free 24-hour emergency line routinely assists panicked callers who find animals—such as cats, chipmunks, opossums, moles, birds, reptiles, mice, and rats—stuck on glue traps often purchased from The Home Depot. There are numerous other options available to deal with uninvited guests in homes so there is simply no excuse for continuing to sell these pans of pain.

My question is this: When will The Home Depot do what it knows is right and end the sale of glue traps?