Trapping Is Cruel

To The Editor:

We read, with great concern, your recent article about the Pa. Game Commission’s misguided promotion of trapping as a means of wildlife control.

Trappers worldwide kill millions of raccoons, coyotes, wolves, bobcats, opossums, beavers, otters, and other furbearing animals every year for the clothing industry.

The steel-jaw trap, which the American Veterinary Medical Association calls “inhumane,” has been banned by the European Union and in a growing number of states across the U.S.

When an animal steps on the spring, the trap’s jaws slam on the animal’s limb. The animal frantically struggles in excruciating pain as the trap cuts into its flesh, often down to the bone, mutilating the animal’s foot or leg.

Some animals, especially mothers desperate to get back to their young, fight so vigorously that they attempt to chew or twist off their trapped limbs. This struggle may last for hours. Eventually, the animal succumbs to exhaustion and often exposure, frostbite, shock, and death.

If trapped animals do not die from blood loss, infection, or gangrene, they will probably be killed by predators or hunters. Victims of water-set traps, including beavers and muskrats, can take more than nine agonizing minutes to drown.

Every year, dogs, cats, birds, and other animals, including endangered species, are crippled or killed by traps.

Contrary to fur-industry propaganda, there is no ecologically sound reason to trap animals for “wildlife.” In fact, trapping upsets natural controls by killing healthy animals needed to keep their species strong.

Left alone, animal populations regulate their own numbers. Even if human intervention or an unusual natural occurrence caused an animal population to rise temporarily, the group would soon stabilize through natural processes no more cruel, even at their worst, than the pain and trauma of being trapped and slaughtered by humans.

As your story pointed out, trapping has become less profitable and the number of trappers has dropped. Meanwhile, public distaste and anti-fur activism keep the pressure on, as a suffering fur industry continues to try to find ways to make its cruel product appealing to consumers, and as public game agencies, dependent on license fees, use the news media to recruit more trappers.

Bonnie Senz People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Norfolk, Va