Short, simple, and sweet.
These are leghold traps, not Conibears. Most states don’t allow Conibear traps on land.
In most states, trappers are required to check their traps once a day (usually in the morning).
I remember when West Virginia tried to get rid of this requirement, and the trappers themselves lobbied to keep it. No one wants to see animals suffer.
i have never seen anyone set RUBBER-jawed
leghold traps – ever; the jerk that was planting
TAGLESS leghold-traps on our No-Trespassing
signed private-property was planting tooth-jawed
traps that were 2/3 the size of my foot –
FYI i wear a size 9-B and am 5-ft 8-inches tall.
IOW my foot from my toe to my instep would
easily fit inside those jaws, and they WOULD
do damage – significant damage.
we pulled them, we KEPT them and we reported
the illegal traps and the trespassing to the local
Game Warden [Bucks Co, PA] – they were never claimed, eventually the person stopped planting them, and by great good fortune, no livestock, dogs, people, etc, in our family were injured.
each tooth was an inch across at the bottom and 3/4-inch high, and while not sharp i have no doubt they’d have broken skin AND been the cause of nasty infections; they were rusty and filthy-jawed, altho the pan and trip mechanism was oiled and well-maintained.
how many trappers USE rubber-jawed traps?
paint me extremely skeptical,
– terry
terry pride, APDT-Aus, apdt#1827, CVA, TDF
Even if they are rubber-jawed, they are designed to take one hold and that’s it.
Leghold traps are designed not to cut the animal. If an animal is injured, it is because the trapper didn’t make sure that a rough edge didn’t get filed down.
These traps are very important to wildlife conservation:
http://www.maninnature.com/Management/Conservation/WConservation1c.html
“Required” to check doesn’t mean that they do.
“no one wants to see animals suffering??” WTF? Can you possibly imagine that an animal caught in a trap, for however many hours, ISNT suffering?
please.
Even a barrel trap like the ones they use for bears causes suffering.
Even if the animal isn’t cut, and even if it doesn’t chew its leg off, it’s not exactly free to go about its normal day, is it?
Emily,
How many trappers do you know? I have never known one would would just leave an animal there for days and days. Plus, the chances of catching a dog put a lot of pressure on them. If you catch a dog, you want to get it out ASAP.
No trapper worth his salt would leave an animal in the trap any longer than a couple of hours. The longer that animal is in the trap the more damage to its fur it might do.
Further, please read the Ted Williams piece I posted in one of the comments. This is very important for conservation. All the wolves that are in Yellowstone are still trapped with leghold traps, because wild canids typically won’t go into box traps. All the otters in West Virginia right now descend from ancestors who were trapped with legholds in other states.
The animal might be stressed a bit, but it’s far better of than any animals that are kept on fur farms. Those animals spend their lives as they were meant to, and it is just for that little time period before they are dispatched that they feel any minor discomfort. I don’t think they are having fun, but they aren’t in excruciating pain and they aren’t chewing their feet off. These are PeTA myths.
Now, there are problems with manufacturers that produce traps that may have an edge on the jaws when they are cast, and that can cut a bit. So it’s the job of all ethical trappers to ensure that those edges are smooth.
Most fur-bearers are nocturnal and are caught at night. The traps are usually checked in the morning, meaning they usually aren’t in the trap very long at all.
Slob-trappers let stuff like this happen:
All of these trappers who do it ethically know that they could easily be banned. That’s why the trappers in WV lobbied to keep the 24 hour check a law
QUOTE, R-man:
“These traps are very important to wildlife conservation”
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the trappers that i knew were not CONSERVING anything,
they were TAKING furs – meaning they caught live-animals, killed them, skinned them, and sold the skins.
this was not for planting live-critters elsewhere,
it was about fur – which entails killing the animal, since U can hardly skin them alive, it’s much harder work, they won’t hold still.
none of them used rubber-jaws, they used ordinary tooth-jawed traps, and if the weather was crappy they might not check their traps for a day or 2 or 3.
and BTW – i’ve seen animals with wrung-off limbs,
don’t tell me it’s PETA-propaganda, i’ve BEEN ALIVE longer than PETA has existed.
i have nursed animals caught in legholds with broken paws, broken legs, infections, etc.
claiming it’s all made-up? Bollocks.
disgusted,
– terry
Where I live they have to pay a license fee. That goes to wildlife.
And they reduce the densities of certain fur-bearers, like red foxes. At high densities, foxes will get awful diseases, usually bad Sarcoptes, and die. I’d rather those foxes be trapped and killed than die an angonizing death of Sarcoptes.
I’m sorry you had a bad experience with trappers, but they are the most demonized people in wildlife.
Nature is far crueler than anything a trapper can do to a fox or mink. And in most of the east, red foxes have no significant predators– coyotes take the odd one but it’s not significant.
So their numbers must be managed somehow, or do you like having distemper and mange epidemics? Because that’s the alternative to trapping.
QUOTE, R-man:
“in most of the east, red foxes have no significant predators – coyotes take the odd one but it’s not significant.
So their numbers must be managed somehow, or do you like having distemper and mange epidemics? Because that’s the alternative to trapping.”
———————————
horse manure – the number of predators cannot outgrow the number of their PREY popns, there are not hordes of fox swarming like honeybees in July.
the Isle Royale wolves have had NO popn-control; the moose-popn has swung wildly up and down, the wolves went from a low of 19 to a high of 31. meanwhile the variation in moose-numbers changed by factors of ten and more.
human-hunters do not HAVE TO control predators;
deer AKA hoofed-rats, we could use a lot less of, but that is entirely because WE ELIMINATED their predators –
and BTW, we don’t want them back; we want all the deer, grouse, pheasant, quail, rabbits, etc, for OURSELVES, thanks.
any deer-hunter in Penna will tell U how poor the hunting was, and how few the deer; meanwhile there isn’t a single red-oak sprout younger than a 30-YO mature tree,
CUZ THE DEER of which there are so pathetically few,
EAT THEM before they reach 2-ft tall.
deer-hunters are never satisfied with the deer-popn until they can kill one out the bathroom window without getting off the toilet – then they’re happy.
there are plenty of out-of-whack wildlife popns; fox are not among them.
– terry
Foxes aren’t wolves. They evolved with a lot of predators, and they tend to produce a surplus population. If they don’t have prey or territories, how do you think these surplus foxes die?
Disease is an important regulator of foxes when they exist with little predation: http://tinyurl.com/2bc63tc
Read from where it say red foxes to the end.
Fox populations are not like wolf populations on Isle Royale, and for most people in the Eastern US, red foxes are not a native species. They aren’t native to West Virginia. for example.
When fox populations get out of whack, disease takes care of them. That’s what happens to prey species.
I was TRYING to just sit back and read and not blather so much for a change, but I just cannot let this subject go. I TRY to be open-minded about stuff–I think I am about hunting. And I know there are probably some sorta ethical trappers out there, but to try and present steel jaw traps(toothed, plain steel or rubberized) as “not so bad” is definetely a trapper’s/human opinion–NOT the animals’!!!!! THEY ARE CRUEL–ain’t no getting around it!! The only question is ARE THEY EVER REALLY NECESSARY? Sometimes–for research when nothing else works(and then only barely as much as necessary to be ethical), and to catch renegade animals that nothing else has worked on–that’s IT in my opinion. For rich, overly civilzed humans to don fashionable coats they need like a hole-in-th-head? I prefer the fur on the critters thank-you! Don’t try and tell me these traps don’t hurt that much–I was CAUGHT IN ONE when I was a kid about 9 years old–not only did it scare the crap outta me, it tore my fingers up purty good trying to get it off. Rubberized or not, the animal’s struggles to get free cause plenty of pain, stress and suffering. Laws that state you must check your traps every 24 hours? Let me tell you, ONE HOUR in such a device is abject cruelty, much less ALL FRIKKIN” NIGHT!!! Especially if it is cold, inclinement weather(which it usually is during trapping season!)…To Be Continued….
When you were kid, the traps weren’t designed properly. Traps with teeth have been illegal for a very long time.
They are now designed to just hold the foot. They do not have a cutting edge on them anymore.
I’d like to know how wolves are going to be caught for reintroduction when the only traps that work for them are legholds? How are we going to manage problem wolves once it becomes obvious that their numbers are going to be sustainable?
The only alternative I’ve found is this one: http://www.collarum.com/
I am opposed to Conibear traps, simply because they do kill and not always instantly. But the legholds– the modern legholds– are not designed to be torture devices. They are the only practical way– unless collarums become very popular– for trapping canid.
Keep in mind that the great wolf expert David Mech is a trapper and runs a 200 trap line in Minnesota for mink. http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/volunteer/janfeb04/mech.html
I don’t think he’d be in favor of something that was that cruel to animals, even though he doesn’t much like dogs.
….Unfortunetely, I have LOTS of experiences with people trapping—ALL NEGATIVE. All were definetely “slob trappers”–very casual about checking them–animals left in traps crippled and in pain for DAYS–even found some starved to death. I have known many dogs and cats caught and then killed by the trappers(back in the days when no one in the country ever thought of penning or chaining up their dogs, or having only cats kept in the house)killed because they didn’t want to bother setting them free and maybe getting bit for their troubles–also didn’t want it known by the owners that they had crippled their pets/hunting dogs!–I knew of one beagle caught for SIX DAYS before the owner found it–a miracle the sack of bones was alive–the only reason it was was because it could reach a creek to get water on the end of the chain–it’s leg had to be amputated though(but it did make it). Ditto for more hunters with hounds than I can count–houndsmen usually HATE jaw traps with a passion! I have NEVER known any of these slob trappers to have been reprimanded or such laws as how often they check their traps enforced. I have been in such debates with trappers about how the trap really doesn’t hurt so much—BULLS**T!!!! They have even set a little muskrat trap and put their own fingers in it to prove such–but does a mousetrap(which at least kills the mouse quickly when it works right) hurt a dog if it snaps on it’s nose? Not hardly–I tell these guys–yeah, let me get a frikkin’ BEAR TRAP(appropriate to human size) and stick yer dang leg in it, and see how THAT feels!!!! even a RUBBER JAWED one–and leave yer arse out in it all night (or for days)struggling in fear and pain, and THEN tell me that it ain’t so bad!!! The only good thing about this issue is that it IS getting rarer and rarer to find people trapping for “sport” or to make a little money–I used to find (and raided and destroyed EVERY ONE!!! EVERY CHANCE I GOT!!!) traps set all the time in the woods for critters–almost never these days. That’s one outdoor activity I’m glad as heck to see dissapearring. No device invented by man has ever been crueler–I HATE them!!!!! And this is not PETA-nonsense, but my own experiences over many years. And ironically, I believe the first gin traps(steel-jaw traps) were invented to catch HUMANS–poachers on estates in Europe!!!!
There must be a lot of crappy trappers in NC, who don’t realize how easily their privileges can be revoked.
My grandpa was a trapper, and used these things to supplement his income. The legholds never injured the foxes.
I think people are keying in too much on the fear behavior that foxes and coyotes show when they are confronted by people.
I would be very leery of destroying someone’s personal property. Those traps are not cheap.
I have no venom for ethical trappers.
I have more for people who gut shoot a deer and leave to suffer and die of sepsis.
You cannot have wolf reintroduction without these traps. Simple fact.
And I wouldn’t have otters without them either. Simple fact.
I think they should make these traps as humane as possible– and they are.
I have never met a trapper who didn’t appreciate animals and have a deep understanding of their behavior– which includes an understanding of their capacity for pain.
Please read the Ted Williams piece I have posted in the comments of one of these posts.
I have seen an antique bear trap. I absolutely wouldn’t want that set.
http://www.furcommission.com/resource/perspect95.htm
That was originally published in Audubon Magazine.
How recently were these rubberized leghold traps produced?
Within the past decade:
http://www.oneidavictor.com/softcatchtraps.html
Did you even look at the statement from the source company for the rubberized leghold traps you provided?
http://www.oneidavictor.com/prosandconsofanimaltraps.html
Leg Hold Traps – Leg Traps
These are the types of traps one thinks of when conjuring the term “coyote ugly”, as in a trapped target that chews off its own limb to escape the trap. Animals caught in leghold traps might also be at great risk to predators in the area. The most logical and responsible solution to prevent both animal suffering, and loss of target to predators is for trappers to check their traps frequently as to reduce the chance of these things taking place.
Conibear or “Body Gripper” Traps
The Conibear, or body-gripper type of trap was designed to result in the swift death of its capture. The desired outcome is the humane and minimal suffering of the intended catch. A very serious concern with the use of these traps is the catching of unintended or “non-target” animals who accidentally become ensnared in a Conibear body gripper trap. Most non-target animals who are caught in this kind of trap do not survive.
It is therefore the position of the Oneida Victor company that Conibear traps NOT BE USED in areas that pose serious threats to non-target animals, or accidental catches. If domestic pets, endangered/threatened species, or human beings risk becoming injured or killed encountering a Conibear trap, the trapper should select an alternative method of achieving the capture of the desired target animal.
Far too many trappers have disregarded concern for this topic, and far too many domestic pets have needlessly died. Please do your part to see that this becomes a topic of the past. Thank you.
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Also, it’s strange that their “STARTER KITS” don’t contain rubberized traps. Perhaps it’s because they sell far fewer of those than the other types?
They probably don’t because trapping is a skill that is learned almost by apprenticeship, and the older trappers are generally skeptical of the efficacy of rubber-jawed traps but even the steel-jawed traps are designed to have a smoother edge than that which existed just decades ago.
Oh, yes, Conibears shouldn’t be set anywhere were there are people or domestic animals. Most states require that they be used in water sets.
One trapper disregarding this advice is too many.
From the book “Guide To Trapping” by Jim Spencer, 2007 –
“The definition of what constitutes a water set varies from state to state. In some states, the trap must be completely submerged, and in others part of the trap may be above water. Regardless of the trapping regulations, though, any trapper who uses beaver-size body-grippers should use them carefully, because these traps are perfectly capable of killing pets and livestock.”