This commentary is by Norm Vandal, a resident of Roxbury.
Maybe you’re a trapper fighting to stubbornly preserve your cherished recreation, or a Vermont legislator planning to vote in support of continuing recreational trapping in Vermont, or maybe you’re a citizen who’s ambivalent or misguided about trapping and doesn’t care one way or another.
If so, then perhaps you may want to take part in my experiment. We start with a jaw trap proportionate to your hand as a legal trap is to the paw of a red fox. From my calculations, it would be about 12 inches across. We bait the trap with a hundred-dollar bill, not much more than a trapper will profit from this so-called “recreation” in any given season.
The trap is fastened to the ground, chained to a 4-foot section of half-inch steel rebar driven down below the surface. You want that $100, so you carefully reach into the jaws of the hidden trap, and SNAP! Your hand is caught immediately.
The initial, powerful snap of the trap smashes the trapezium bone at the base of your thumb. It breaks the trapezoid bone in the same area. You have three broken metacarpal bones. Ligaments are injured with resulting sprains. A large number of blood vessels that feed the hand are primarily crushed, and many are blocked completely. Sensitive nerves are pinched, and the flow of information between your hand and your brain is interrupted or corrupted.
The pain is sharp, instantaneous, throbbing, makes you scream, but after a while, your fingers begin to turn deep red, then purple, then eventually black. The hand is horribly swollen, and the throbbing pain begins to travel up your arm. You can think of only two things: getting free from this terrible trap and ending this horrible pain.
You can’t get out of the trap. You’ve tried and tried. Pulled interminably on the chain. Twisted, contorted your body, but it’s no use. You’re imprisoned, exhausted and afraid. Desperate, maybe you should gnaw off your hand? Stomp on your arm to snap the exposed bones at your wrist?
You’re caught and have no one to help. No one hears your cries. Hours pass by, a long, terrible night, and it’s now the next day, 24 hours after you became captured. Delirious with pain, you don’t know if you’ll ever get out, and you’ll do anything to stop the damn pain, but there’s nothing you can do. Nothing you can do. Until ….
C’mon; don’t you want to take part in the experiment? Why not? You don’t have to explain, but as a recreational trapper, why are you willing to subject a living thing to this cruel, inhumane, archaic and unnecessary practice?
Because you enjoy doing this? It’s fun. It’s challenging. Rich people need fur? Why not trap your pets for fun? Dog or cat? Both? Your neighbors’ pets too? For recreation? For sport?
If you have a cat that you’ve sadly decided must be euthanized by your vet, does he tell you to catch it in a jaw trap and either shoot it, club it to death, or wait hours for him to arrive? Why not? We kill lots of animals for meat: cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, chickens, etc. Do we trap them and then club them?
If you hunt, you know it’s illegal to bait game animals to attract them. Hunters can’t lure in deer with cracked corn or even with salt licks where they might be shot more humanely than being subjected to the cruelties of being caught in a trap for hours on end. However, it’s completely legal to bait traps; in fact, necessary in most cases. That’s how ridiculous the law is.
Vermont Fish & Wildlife says that trapping is “strictly regulated,” but there is no way the department can realistically keep track of actual trapping practices and trappers as regulations suggest. Ask game wardens how often they go into the woods to check traplines, etc. Laws that are impossible to enforce are superfluous and frequently broken.
Fish & Wildlife says that furbearing species are carefully regulated, but the truth is there is no way to accurately or conclusively determine these populations, and the main source of information they mine is predominantly from dead animals. Yet, the department says furbearers are “always common and abundant.”
They have no way of knowing this other than surmising from their dead animal counts, and this is an absurd statement on its face. Always? What is “abundant”? Bison were once common and abundant. Passenger pigeons too. Fish & Wildlife admits that trapping is not necessary to maintain populations, and so it responds to this by having zero established trapping bag limits on most of the furbearing species?
Again, they have no data that conclusively proves any of this; it’s all conjecture or estimation. How is this trapping cruelty justified? Because some people enjoy doing it? Because it brings in money? Because it preserves an archaic tradition that caters to the mountain man machismo, self-reliant, homesteader-imagery, romantic bullcrap? The primal conquest? Man versus the wilderness? Jeremiah Johnson? Daniel Boone? Trading beaver pelts for salt, flour, sugar and long guns?
Times long gone, as should be recreational trapping.
Recreational trapping is undeniably, inherently cruel. It’s inhumane and completely unnecessary. If you enjoy it or think that it’s OK, then perhaps you should contemplate why you are unable to experience empathy and sympathy for other creatures as you should? If you really believe that leghold traps don’t cause pain, then prove it by taking part in my experiment.
Paws aren’t hands, you say, but how do you know this? Is it really logical? Maybe you just like supplying furs to the very rich via this typically proletariat “recreation”? You like to outfox foxes, acknowledging their prodigious intelligence, yet you’ll say they’re only animals and we can’t compare them to humans. Yeah, they’re just not smart enough to use leghold traps, or to avoid them.
Animals don’t feel pain like humans, you say, but it appears some humans can’t even imagine an animal’s obvious, completely visible pain. Or sadly, just aren’t compassionate enough to care. It’s the tradition that you like, so all of us who appreciate and cherish wild creatures should allow you to continue to do this? We owe it to you? We can sacrifice a few animals to your cruelty? Right? So you can have some fun?
I mean, you’ve been doing it for a long time. You say people who don’t trap don’t really understand. Well, I did trap when I was a young man, and I am completely ashamed that I did so, and disgusted that I did not see it for what it really is. As we live, we can continue to learn, and as that happens, we can learn to live better, hopefully with more dignity and compassion, unafraid to make changes that are imminent.
Culture is constantly evolving. As traditions and practices are evaluated, some are maintained, and some are likewise abandoned. Recreational trapping is no longer necessary or acceptable by the vast majority of the population, and it needs to be ended. It needs to die.
If you feel compelled to capture animals, do it with a camera, a game camera or with your own eyes.
