When Emily Baldwin and her roommate found a mouse in the kitchen of their Hell’s Kitchen apartment, they panicked. After they called their building’s live-in super, he lined the borders of their kitchen with glue traps.
It worked — except the scene was too disgusting for either of them to clean up on their own.
“In its struggle to try to release itself … it took all the skin off of its own tail and it was still alive,” Baldwin said. “We had to then vacate the premises until the building manager could come and remove it because we certainly weren’t prepared to deal with that ourselves.”
Years after that experience, she’s a homeowner in Westchester, N.Y., and still won’t touch a glue trap or use one in her home, especially now as a parent to young kids and two cats.
Pest control is a constant part of home maintenance whether you’re in a co-op, a condo, or a standalone house. But toeing the line between humane and, well, lethal can be difficult, especially if the goal is just to trap a mouse and get it out of your house.
Glue traps are a hotly debated solution for this, with animal rights activists and pest control professionals alike saying they’re ineffective for rodent issues in particular. But beyond efficacy, opinions really split on the ethics of using them.
From individual homeowners to city and state government, in places like New York and California, the controversy is driving folks to consider ditching glue traps or outright banning them. If you’re on the fence about using glue traps in your own home, here are some things you should know:
They don’t work how you might want them to
Many people think of glue traps as a set-and-forget solution to a mouse problem, but they’re anything but.
According to professionals, they might not catch many mice at all. Dominick Romeo, a longtime New York City superintendent based in Chelsea who handles some of the pest control in his building, said mice are much more intelligent than people give them credit for, and won’t fall for these traps for long.
“The adult mice don’t go anywhere near those glue traps. They don’t go anywhere near the bait traps,” he said. “They communicate just like us and they’ve seen their friends get stuck in them, so they avoid them to no end.”
If you do try to DIY a mouse problem with glue traps and happen to catch some, it could be messier and involve a lot more suffering than you think. Once a mouse is stuck on a glue trap, it tends to panic and get itself even more stuck. The resulting exhaustion, dehydration and severed limbs make for a painful death for the mouse as it tries to free itself. Not to mention an unpleasant experience for you as you hear it all happening.
Glue traps catch whatever crosses their paths, including your furry friends
Because glue traps indiscriminately stick to whatever touches them, they pose a risk to animals you never intended to catch, like pets. A nosy pet could wind up stuck to a glue trap depending on how accessible it is, or how determined your pet is to crawl into a narrow space. Even well-hidden glue traps in your own home can get dragged into the open by a partially stuck mouse, making it easy for a pet to get to it.
Julie Cappiello, a board member at the New York-based animal rights advocacy group Voters For Animal Rights also pointed out that glue traps pose a danger for wildlife and stray animals too. She said depending on the size of the glue trap, anything from birds and squirrels to larger animals like cats can get stuck on these traps. This situation can be fatal, especially without someone monitoring these traps and animals the way they might inside a home.
Trying to painlessly free an animal from a glue trap once it’s stuck isn’t easy either.
“Once they’re on there, they’re on there,” said Romeo, who said he doesn’t like using glue traps to catch mice and has unsuccessfully tried freeing them from glue traps before.
Prevention is the best medicine
By the time you notice a pest issue, the problem could be worse than you think and could be difficult to handle humanely. Instead of waiting until then to spend time and money on aggressive pest control or glue traps, experts and activists alike recommend taking on the upfront cost of pest-proofing your home.
While it’s possible to do this yourself, Romeo said hiring a professional to go through your entire home and cover up every crack and hole is the most effective way to to stop unwanted critters — especially mice and rats — from coming inside.
Some common entry points for rodents he pointed out include gaps around pipes, like behind your stove, under your kitchen or bathroom sink, or around radiators. He also recommends caulking gaps between the floorboard and the floor.
“Keep in mind you’re never going to have a mouse or rat issue after doing that, so it’s worth its weight in gold,” Romeo said.
Other alternatives to get that mouse out of your house — and keep it there
If you happen to be actively dealing with a mouse problem, there are more options beyond glue traps.
For a more humane option, Capiello suggests picking up a set of live traps from a hardware store, department store or online. These traps are essentially containers with one-way doors that you can bait with food to lure mice inside. Once a mouse is caught inside, it can safely be released outside — ideally far away from your home.
She also recommends keeping your home as clean and decluttered as possible. Mice like to nest in areas that are full of clutter, so doing things like shredding that pile of old mail and throwing away those boxes should make it less likely for them to stick around.
While they’re considered inhumane, snap traps are another easily accessible consumer option. However, Capiello warns that they don’t always work as instantly or effectively as expected. Mice often get trapped alive without dying, which can be unsightly and uncomfortable — much like what happens with glue traps.
Will glue traps stick around much longer?
A few bills aimed at banning glue traps have been proposed in New York over the years starting in the 2021-2022 legislative session. The latest, introduced on January 23, aims to ban the use of glue traps only in state-owned or state-leased buildings in New York. It’s an amendment to earlier versions of the bill introduced on September 12, 2022 and April 13, 2023 that more broadly aimed to ban the production, sale and all use of animal glue traps in the entire state. Like earlier iterations of the bill, the newest version still hasn’t moved past the committee in the state Senate or Assembly, but it does have the support of the New York City Bar’s Animal Law Committee.
If passed, New York would be the first state to ban the use of glue traps in government buildings, but it wouldn’t be the first place in the U.S. to issue and enforce a ban at all. Two California cities, West Hollywood and Ojai, already banned locally the sale and use of glue traps in 2023 and 2024, respectively, with West Hollywood being the first in the country to do so.
“We would love to see New York State ban the sale, the manufacturing, everything when it comes to glue traps, because they’re incredibly inhumane,” said Cappiello. “The state legislature is just — they’re not ready to do that at the moment.”
But professionals like Romeo say rodent and insect casualties are unfortunate but necessary for maintaining human wellbeing as part of a comprehensive pest control strategy, especially when maintaining apartment buildings. Glue traps help professionals monitor early signs of bug infestations, preventing particularly harmful ones like German roach and bed bug infestations from happening.
Trapping bugs in glue traps even help detect structural issues in a property. Romeo, for example, was able to figure out there was a leak behind a wall after seeing a bug drawn to running water stuck in a glue trap near that wall. Being unable to set glue traps would make maintaining his building more difficult.
It’s possible that opposition to glue traps could grow even bigger too. California Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Los Angeles County) proposed the Glue Trap Prohibition Act in January 2024, though it hasn’t gained traction since then.