This commentary is by John Aberth, a resident of Roxbury.
Brehan Furfey, author of “Wildlife conservation depends on regulated trapping,” argues that “regulated trapping is a critical wildlife management tool that benefits furbearer populations.”
There is one entity that disagrees with that statement. And that is the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department.
Last year, a petition was submitted to the department requesting that trapping of fisher, a vital predator species, be put on hold because trapping data showed that their populations since 2003 were in decline. Testing of fisher carcasses showed that this was due to rodenticide ingested by the animals.
The response of department biologists, which was recorded for the public record, was that trapping data in this instance was not to be trusted, and that other sources of data on fisher populations — such as road kills, trail camera recordings, scat samples, etc. — pointed to fisher populations being healthy and robust, and that therefore no action needed to be taken regarding trapping of fisher.
Now, with a recreational trapping ban before the Legislature, it is perhaps no surprise that a department biologist is reverting once again to the default position that trapping is essential to wildlife management.
It is patently absurd to argue that trapping should be continued simply to procure biological samples from furbearers. Such sampling constitutes a fraction of the overall kills from the recreational trapping season, which kills thousands of species every year.
Such sampling, if it is needed to be done, can easily be achieved with cage trapping of live animals that are captured and then released, rather than resorting to the cruelties of leghold and conibear trapping, which causes tremendous suffering and death, including of nontarget animals. And it’s important to note that even when the department learns of threats to populations due to rodenticide (e.g., fisher) or water contaminants (e.g., otters), it does nothing to address it.
In fact, despite knowing that otter populations are threatened by PCBs and mercury, the department agreed to a trapper’s petition to extend the trapping season. That is politics, not science-based management.
The author’s second contention is that if “regulated trapping is outlawed,” then we will have Beaver Armageddon. She alleges that in Massachusetts, where trapping restrictions were enacted by ballot initiative in 1996, it resulted in a “doubling” of the beaver population and, consequently, a corresponding increase in complaints and public dissatisfaction with “nuisance” beavers.
In actual fact, nobody knows what really happened to the beaver population in Massachusetts after 1996, for the simple reason that trapping data that was used to track populations prior to the ban effectively disappeared. In the words of Dave Wattles, furbearer biologist for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife: “Did low harvest numbers (after 1996) inflate the (population) estimate, lower it, or does it not matter? I am not familiar enough with the inner workings of the model to even speculate” (private e-mail communication, April 1, 2021).
To argue from the Massachusetts example that trapping restrictions would cause beaver populations to explode is indulging in an exercise of wish fulfillment and pure guesswork, rather than good, hard science.
Additionally, the department talks a lot about “regulated trapping,” but it has done nothing to address the unregulated trapping that occurs year-round under the dangerously broad statute title 10 V.S.A. 4828. This allows private landowners and town selectboards to trap any animal perceived to be causing “damage or submersion” to property, without being subject to the usual “law or rules” regarding trapping. It is essentially an open season on beavers, foxes, and other animals.
Wildlife advocates have tried for years to work with the department to improve this law to better protect wildlife, and it has refused. So if the department truly cared about “regulated trapping,” as it claims, then why has it turned a blind eye to unregulated trapping?
The author is right that a working group authorized by the Legislature in 2022 did attempt to develop new regulations for trapping, but not all “stakeholders” were satisfied by the results. In particular, wildlife advocates who were part of the group walked away with none of their proposals being adopted by the department, and they uniformly criticized the new regulations as doing practically nothing to mitigate animal suffering in traps or to make traps more selective in terms of capturing only targeted animals.
The Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department states as its mission: “the conservation of fish, wildlife, and plants and their habitats for the people of Vermont.” Trapping of furbearers such as beavers is directly counterproductive to this mission. By removing some 1,400 beavers every year from the landscape, recreational trapping destroys hundreds of wetland habitats that are critical for a variety of species aside from beavers and that beavers maintain through their damming of streams and other waterways.
Little to none of this trapping addresses nuisance conflicts, which are handled separately by municipalities on a case-by-case basis. By far, the best thing we could do, for both the animals and human wildlife management, is to ban recreational trapping.
