People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals often sends out notices shaming those who harm or endanger animals. After an anti-vivisection group came down on Newport Harbor High School students a couple years ago for posting pictures of themselves online messing around with dead cats they'd dissected in class, PETA offered the school district an alternative lesson plan. So it's refreshing to see PETA today praising a company across town in Newport Beach.
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After learning from PETA about “the cruelty of using glue traps to kill mice,” Westport Properties removed and banned the devices from all 60 of its US Storage Centers self-storage facilities in California and eight other states, the animal rights group announces in an email to the Weekly.
For this, the company is to receive a Compassionate Company Award from PETA and a big box of vegan chocolates shaped like mice.
“From the West Coast to New England, US Storage Centers are now glue trap-free zones,” says Daphna Nachminovitch, PETA's senior vice president, in the email. “By removing and banning glue traps, Westport Properties has spared countless mice, birds, and other small animals a terrifying and painful end.”
Westport Properties joins Uncle Bob's Self Storage, Extra Space Storage and “the majority of the nation's top banks and other financial institutions” in pledging to stop using glue traps after hearing from PETA.
You may have used glue traps in your home. Plastic or cardboard floors of boxes that usually contain substances luring pests inside are coated with a strong adhesive so, as the old roach motel ads used to say, they can get in, but they can't get out.
According to PETA, before these captured critters die they often break bones and/or rip flesh, fur or feathers while struggling to get free. “Some animals chew off their own limbs in an attempt to free themselves,” the group says, “and others get their noses, mouths, or beaks stuck in the glue. The more the animals struggle, the more they stick to the traps, only to die from exhaustion, injury, shock, dehydration, asphyxiation, or blood loss.”
The nonprofit also warns glue traps are not effective because they don't address the source of the problem, as more mice simply file in after their cousins have been killed.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.