The New York City Council is weighing a ban on glue traps, those adhesive boards used to catch mice and rats, in a move that pits animal welfare concerns against the city’s long and losing battle with its rodent population.

Councilmember Harvey Epstein, a Democrat representing the East Village and Lower East Side, introduced the bill to prohibit the sale of glue traps within city limits. The traps work by immobilizing rodents on a sticky surface, leaving them to die slowly, sometimes over hours. Animal rights advocates have long called the devices cruel, and they point to an additional hazard: pets and small children can get stuck in them too.

“The way glue traps work is harmful not just to the animals but to family pets and society at large,” Epstein said.

Epstein brought a similar measure during his seven years as a state assemblymember in Albany. Now, working from City Hall, he has a new venue to push the idea forward. His co-sponsor, Councilmember Farah Louis of Brooklyn, said her support comes largely from concern about unintended victims. “Sometimes children or pets get caught in the trap,” Louis said. “That’s the reason why I supported the bill.”

The proposal arrives at an interesting moment in the city’s complicated relationship with rats. The Adams administration spent years on aggressive rodent control, declaring what the mayor called a “war on rats” and appointing a so-called “rat czar” to oversee the effort. The city deployed carbon monoxide to fill rat burrows and pushed hard on trash containerization and composting. The results showed some traction: rat sightings dropped roughly 20 percent between 2024 and 2025, according to the Department of Sanitation and data pulled from 311 calls.

But even with that progress, the city is hardly rat-free. According to the book “Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Inhabitants,” a single breeding pair of rats can theoretically produce 15,000 descendants in a year. The math alone explains why extermination campaigns have never fully solved the problem.

Epstein says the answer is not more killing but smarter containment. He points to the same containerization policies that helped drive down 311 complaints, along with measures like sealing building entry points. “I think what we’ll do is reduce the population,” he said. “We’ll coexist with them like we coexist with other wildlife.”

Not everyone is ready to extend that kind of goodwill toward rats. Vigilante rat-hunting groups operate by night in city parks. Curtis Sliwa, during his run for mayor, proposed deploying feral cat colonies as a form of pest control. The city’s contempt for its rodent residents has rarely needed encouragement.

Animal rights organizations are cheering Epstein’s bill. PETA expressed support for the measure. Laura Tartaglia, a spokesperson for Voters for Animal Rights, called glue traps cruel and ineffective, and said the political momentum is building. “It is slowly growing as a movement,” Tartaglia said, pointing to Ulster County and other jurisdictions that have moved to restrict or ban glue trap sales.

The broader trend she describes reflects a shift in how some lawmakers and advocates think about pest control, less as a matter of extermination and more as one of management and prevention. Whether that framing finds traction in a city where rat complaints remain a fixture of neighborhood life is another question.

The bill still faces a full legislative process at the Council. It has no timeline for a hearing or vote yet. But the sponsors are betting that the same city that managed to meaningfully cut rat sightings through policy, rather than poison, might be ready to take the next step. Banning one of the more gruesome tools in the pest control arsenal would not end the city’s rat problem. Epstein and his colleagues would say that was never the goal.