A Perspective on Trapping

There's nothing abstract about trapping. It's rarely about putting food on the table. It is sometimes about making a small profit. It has minimum conservation value. It brings fear, pain and premature death to animals that are caught. See for yourself in this brief compilation.

​There are three kinds of trapping:

​1. Intentional - an animal is deliberately caught in a legal trap during a defined season.

​2. "Nuisance" trapping - an animal is trapped out of season because it is classified as a nuisance. It is legal, but there is little or no oversight.

​3. Incidental trapping - an animal is caught accidentally in a trap set for another species. Dogs, cats, birds, etc. are all victims of incidental trapping. 

My Experience with Trapping

by Rob Mullen

Rob is the Chair of the Vermont Wildlife Coalition Board of Directors. The commentary below describes his direct experience with trapping.

Much of the Vermont Trappers Association showed up to our local Select Board meeting, backing the petitioning trapper’s claim that they were all “conservationists,” and would never trap out a beaver colony, and that Preston Pond was overpopulated with up to 20 beavers in the pond. As wrong as that absurd claim was (we are adjacent to the pond and told the Select Board that there were only 3-5 beavers), our Select Board decided that “tradition” and equal recreational opportunity for all dictated that the trapping be allowed.

There were in fact only three beavers. Two were killed, and the survivor abandoned the pond. Now there were none, and it was several years before beavers returned to the pond.

​In talking with personnel at the Fish and Wildlife Department (FWD) and listening to trappers and their advocates, we kept hearing that modern trapping was:

• ​”Highly regulated.”

• “Humane” and designed to “maximize animal welfare” with “Quick-Kill” traps and legholds that caused minimal injury.

• An indispensable “conservation tool.”

In my own reading and research, I learned that:

1. “Highly regulated” included no bag limits on any species, no reporting of numbers killed of any species but three (otter, bobcat, and fisher), no reporting of any “by-catch” including domestic animals or pets and a general difficulty in enforcement that made any claim of being “highly regulated” potentially toothless. Note that trappers are now required to self-report non-targeted catches but anecdotal evidence suggests that self-reporting is limited. According to a public records request obtained from the VT Fish & Wildlife Department, in just two years 22 dogs were reported caught in traps in Vermont and were either injured or killed.

2. “Humane” included using what the FWD calls “quick-kill” traps. The official Best Management Practices (BMP) standard for these political euphemisms is not instantaneous or a few seconds as most humane people might imagine. For a beaver in a ‘Quick-Kill’ Conibear 330 the BMP requires only that 70% of trapped beavers die within 300 seconds (five minutes; and 30% taking any amount of time longer). Underwater sets killed in under nine (9) minutes. I was shocked to learn that my beloved Vermont allows drowning as a “humane” method of killing. Colony traps are designed to drown multiple animals at a time. When you hear about “padded” traps, this is what is being referred to. Traps are not humane. They cause extreme suffering, and adding words like quick-kill or padded to them does not change that fact.

​3. “Conservation tool” - ​a common refrain is that trappers help control populations. It requires some fanciful biology to believe that predators like bobcats, fishers, otters, minks, and weasels, need population control. Predator populations have been naturally regulated for millions of years without any help from us. Territoriality and prey density control predator populations. In 2022, the lead furbearer biologist admitted in an internal email released as part of a public records request that trapping is not necessary to manage furbearer populations or to reduce wildlife diseases.

The argument is often made that trapping provides the FWD with data to track the health and population levels of trapped species. First, given that body counts are only required for three species, that sounds flawed. Moreover, the best (if not only) remedy the FWD has if a species were to show a decline, would be to restrict further trapping so that the FWD essentially allows trapping in order to determine how much trapping they should allow; absent a compelling reason to trap, that is nonsense.

Ironically, the best argument I’ve heard for trapping from the FWD is for beavers. That is not to concede that non-lethal mitigation (which the FWD recommends first) can’t be more effective in human/beaver conflicts, or to concede that a recreational trapping season has enough impact on the beaver population to reduce such conflicts (again, I don’t know), but it is at least a rational argument. The same cannot be said for many if not most of the other furbearers; most particularly the predators.

Death is a necessary part of life and we all kill; whether directly or not. However, we shouldn’t wallow in it. Our ancestors did and long ago wiped out the main predators for deer (along with most of the deer for a long while). Deer have rebounded and now, hunting is a critically important conservation tool. Few furbearers fit that ecological dynamic.

​We should not kill without good reason or need, and then only do so quickly. Trapping, despite its history and utility in times past, has in recent decades, descended to a recreational niche from where its inherent cruelty (BMPs notwithstanding) fails that ethical standard."   

​Rob Mullen of Bolton, VT is a widely recognized wildlife artist who holds a B.S. in Biology. Rob founded the Wilderness River Expedition Art Foundation (WREAF) in 2005. Working with the Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center and the Canadian Boreal Initiative among others, WREAF strives to expand environmental education and awareness of the Boreal Forest.

Protect Our Wildlife Vermont provides comprehensive educational resources on trapping. Please see their website for more information on trapping in Vermont.

The Humane Society of the U.S. also released an undercover investigation on trapping in 2022 - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-undercover-investigation-reveals-the-shocking-brutality-of-trapping-animals-for-fur-and-recreation-in-the-united-states-301507290.html