Appeal No. 2001-2288
Application 09/175,570
a trap assembly comprising a housing and a plurality of panels
removably disposed therein, with the panels having sticky glue
on their surfaces. In proposing to combine Snider and
McQueen, the examiner concludes that it would have been
obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art
to substitute the adhesive traps, as taught by
McQueen, for the spring operated traps of Snider to
utilize traps that operate on the simple principle
of adhesive entrapment and which do not require
manual setting of the traps so as to be able to
catch pests at all times versus spring operated
traps which may become accidentally tripped without
capturing a pest or may injure a user’s hand when
attempting to set the trap [answer, page 5].
The examiner’s position here is reasonable on its face
and has not been specifically challenged by the appellant.
The
appellant does contend, however, that the rejection is unsound
because the combined disclosures of Snider and McQueen do not
teach and would not have suggested a trap meeting the
limitation in claim 1 requiring “a continuous linear array of
horizontally adjacent adhesive roach traps.”
As shown in Figures 1 and 2, Snider’s traps are spaced
apart by horizontal distances appreciably greater than the
widths of the traps. While these traps might be horizontally
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