Field reports & policy updates.

When I moved to New York City, I lived in a brownstone where the hallways were lined with glue traps. I walked past them every day without thinking much about them. They were just part of the building — the same as the radiators or the mail slots.

Then one afternoon I came home and found a mouse stuck to one. It was alive. It was struggling. I told the landlord, and he picked up the trap, mouse still attached, and threw the whole thing in the trash.

I have never stopped thinking about what that mouse's final hours were like. Not because I believe rodents belong in apartment buildings — they don't, and people have a real right to keep their homes clean and safe. But because there was nothing about that moment that needed to happen that way. There were better tools sitting on the same shelf at the same hardware store.

Years later I started reading more, and what I learned changed the scope of the problem for me entirely. It isn't just mice. Glue traps catch songbirds, snakes, lizards, squirrels, bats, and pets — animals nobody intended to catch and nobody was prepared to help. Veterinarians and wildlife rehabilitators across the country have been quietly dealing with the consequences for decades.

So I founded the Georgia Humane Wildlife Coalition. Not to shame anyone who has ever bought a glue trap, and not to tell property owners they have to live with rodents. The goal is narrower and, I think, more achievable: to move Georgia toward pest-control practices that work better and cause less unnecessary suffering — and to build a coalition of veterinarians, rehabilitators, pest-management professionals, and residents who want the same thing.

We are at the very beginning. If that mouse in the hallway means something to you too, I'd like you to be part of what comes next.

One of the first questions we get asked is whether this is actually a Georgia problem, or something imported from other states' campaigns. So we started gathering what documentation already exists here.

Since 2017, a Georgia wildlife rehabilitation center has documented 19 cases of animals caught in glue traps. Not one of them was the intended rodent target. Eighty-four percent of those animals survived to be released back into the wild — a testament to the rehabilitators who treated them, and a reminder of how much labor a single trap can create.

The species list tells the story better than any statistic. Eastern kingsnakes. Black rat snakes. Ringneck snakes. Northern cardinals. A black racer. Five-lined skinks. These are the animals most Georgians would say they want in their yards — several of them eat the very rodents the traps were set for.

The picture from the veterinary side is similar. A metro Atlanta exotic and avian animal hospital reports fielding calls about pets stuck on glue traps roughly weekly to biweekly. Most of those calls involve reptiles.

We want to be careful about what these numbers do and don't show. They are records from individual facilities, not a statewide survey, and they almost certainly undercount: most animals caught in a glue trap are never seen by a rehabilitator or a veterinarian at all. What they do establish is that this is happening in Georgia, regularly, to non-target native wildlife and to people's pets.

Building a fuller record is one of our founding priorities. If you are a Georgia veterinarian, wildlife rehabilitator, or pest-management professional with cases you'd be willing to share, we would like to hear from you.

Policy change on glue traps can sound novel until you look at how much of it has already happened elsewhere.

Wales, Scotland, and England have all restricted or banned glue traps in recent years, moving the devices out of general consumer use — England and Wales through the Glue Traps (Offences) Act 2022, and Scotland through the Wildlife Management and Muirburn (Scotland) Act 2024.

In the United States, the shift is happening city by city. Five California municipalities — West Hollywood, Ojai, Culver City, Ventura, and Laguna Beach — have enacted sale-and-use bans of their own. San Francisco's Commission of Animal Control and Welfare voted unanimously in September 2025 to recommend a citywide ban; that recommendation is still pending before the city's Board of Supervisors. New York City has a pending sales-ban bill, Int. No. 531-2026.

The retail market has moved even faster than the statute books. Target, Walgreens, Dollar Tree, Dollar General, and Rite Aid in the United States — and Dollarama in Canada — have already stopped selling glue traps.

None of this makes Georgia's path automatic. Every jurisdiction has its own process, its own stakeholders, and its own pest-control realities. But it does mean the question here is not whether glue traps can be phased out without leaving property owners defenseless. That question has been answered repeatedly, in places with cold winters, dense housing, and serious rodent pressure.

Georgia could be part of this same shift. That's the work we're organizing to do.