New Jersey Animal Advocate Wins National Award for Sticky Showdown With The Home Depot

For Immediate Release:
December 6, 2022

Contact:
Lauren Kent 202-483-7382

For her impassioned campaign calling on The Home Depot to stop selling glue traps—which cause prolonged suffering as frantic animals try to escape and tear off their own skin in the process—local resident Meira Geyser has been named Activist of the Year by Students Opposing Speciesism (SOS), a PETA-backed, youth-led revolt against speciesism, which is the archaic belief that other animals are inferior and exist solely for humans to exploit.

Geyser was born in New York and grew up in Passaic after her family moved to New Jersey when she was 5 years old. She graduated from Bruriah High School for Girls in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and is now studying communications at Reichman University in Israel. She has helped organize protests outside The Home Depot stores in the Garden State and as far away as Georgia, and her petition “Ban Glue Traps at Home Depot” has more than 61,300 signatures. Geyser keeps up the pressure through social media with frequent posts about The Home Depot’s refusal to stop selling glue traps to customers even though the company stopped using them in its own stores after meeting with PETA in 2017. As she points out, glue traps can cause animals to suffocate, starve to death, chew off their own limbs, and be thrown into the trash while still alive.

“Glue traps sentence vulnerable animals to painful deaths, which is why The Home Depot should join a host of other stores in ending the sale of these cruel traps,” says Geyser. “One of The Home Depot’s own values is ‘Doing the Right Thing,’ and I will continue to push the company to live up to that standard.”

Geyser—who became an animal advocate after learning about cruelty to animals during a tour of Skylands Sanctuary & Animal Rescue in Wantage Township, New Jersey—also takes to Instagram, explaining how cows suffer on dairy farms to her thousands of followers. She is the founder of the Jewish animal rights organization Tikvah for Animals and has helped rescue chickens from the kapparot ritual, during which the birds are slaughtered.

Other nominees for SOS Activist of the Year were animal advocates in Texas and California, whose actions included demanding justice for turkeys beaten at Plainville Farms, organizing provocative campus protests against cruel experiments on monkeys, and calling for an end to marine mammal captivity at SeaWorld.

Activist of the Year is one of the categories in PETA’s 2022 Libby Awards. “Libby” is short for “liberation”—as in “animal liberation”—and the awards, from PETA’s youth division, recognize the individuals, brands, and products that go above and beyond for animals.

SOS shares PETA’s motto: “Animals are not ours to experiment on, eat, wear, use for entertainment, or abuse in any other way.” For more information, please visit SOS.PETA.org or follow SOS on Instagram.