Vilified more than any other wildlife management method, trapping faces constant attacks by animal-rights organizations at every level of government – from state legislation and ballot initiatives to federal legislation we see introduced every year – that seeks to remove its use by citizen sportsmen.
The path to stopping trapping is a familiar one for sportsmen, and one trappers have been fighting for decades. Emotional pleas devoid of fact and filled with outdated imagery, half-truths and outright lies simplify very complex ecosystem management issues into media-friendly sound bites that persuade uninformed urban and suburban residents into voting their way or exerting political pressure on candidates to end the practice entirely.
These shortsighted attacks, if successful, as they have been in a dozen states, saddle taxpayers and wildlife biologists with tremendous debt, destruction, disease and death.
Debt
Absent recreational trapping, state and local governments must pony up to hire professional trappers to manage wildlife conflict due to overpopulation. When social tolerances for wildlife are exceeded, taxpayers foot the bill for the irresponsible management foisted upon society by the animalrights movement – and in many cases the price is steep.
Overall, wildlife damage causes approximately $ 27 BILLION a year in economic loss.
Livestock losses to the sheep and cattle industry exceed $ 60 million a year due to coyotes alone. If you remove current coyote control efforts, something the animal-rights movement would love, consumers would face an additional $ 300 million increase in the cost of doing business to those livestock markets.
Beavers, which are primarily managed through regulated trapping, would cost taxpayers up to $ 40 million a year to keep at acceptable populations levels.
This financial warfare by animal-rights activists accomplishes their ultimate goal on two fronts: first, any ban on trapping is a direct-action victory that ends what they see as barbaric, but, secondly, the impact to residual markets pushes their agenda forward in an indirect manner.
When it comes to the consumption of livestock, the increase cost of doing business is passed along to the consumer, making it difficult( or impossible) for many to afford steak, chicken or eggs. When it comes to wildlife management, damage by furbearers and control methods leach funds from agencies. An increase in apex predators due to the removal of trapping or hunting has a negative impact on big-game herds, which only leave state fish and game agencies a single recourse: reduce the number of tags available to hunters; an action that undermines the funding mechanism of the entire North American conservation model.
The Greatest Irony
While animal-rights activists wrongly paint trapping as a cruel practice that maims and kills without discrimination, what they fail to remember is that some of the greatest examples of saving and reintroducing endangered wildlife was accomplished using traps.
Endangered sea turtles and whooping cranes were protected from predation using traps, and species such as river otters, beavers, fishers and marten have been trapped and reintroduced to areas where extirpated.
The greatest irony, the poster children for animal-rights movement, the grey wolf, grizzly bear and Canada lynx have all been studied and reintroduced using trapping.
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SPORTSMEN’ S MONTHLY January | February 2018