PETA Tells Feds That Tomcat Glue Traps Allegedly Violate California Anti-Cruelty Law

For Immediate Release:
July 9, 2021

Contact:
Moira Colley 202-483-7382

This morning, PETA submitted a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Bureau of Consumer Protection urging the agency to investigate ScottsMiracle-Gro Co. for misleading marketing about its Tomcat brand glue traps. PETA asserts that the company is engaged in prohibited “unfair” activity and is deceiving consumers by advising them to use the devices in a manner that violates California’s cruelty-to-animals law, which prohibits causing an animal unnecessary or unjustifiable physical pain or suffering.

Panicked animals caught in glue traps can suffer for hours or even days. They eventually die painfully and slowly from dehydration, starvation, exhaustion, suffocation, or blood loss after trying to chew off their own limbs or tearing off skin. Despite this, Scotts instructs users to dispose of glue traps containing trapped animals by putting them directly in the garbage, with no recommendations to check traps regularly, release trapped animals humanely, or afford them a quick death.

“PETA believes that Scotts’ marketing of these cruel devices is deceptive and seems to violate the law,” says PETA President Ingrid Newkirk. “PETA is calling on the FTC to investigate and to compel the company to advise consumers how to mitigate, not exacerbate, the suffering caused by its death traps.”

PETA wants the FTC either to forbid Scotts from marketing its Tomcat glue traps altogether or to require, at the very least, that it instruct users to check the traps every hour at a minimum and that it add a label alerting Californians to the fact that the traps may violate state law.

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