A Dying Industry in a Changing World | Trapped In the Past Part 3

We're in some kind of trap line. There were snares everywhere. Carcasses like you would not believe. It changed my life. The primary use of a snare is capturing an animal around the neck and choking it to death. That's the objective. They have been testing killing devices, including snares, and they have not published a single scientific paper. Not a single thing. I assumed that trapping was something that is in the past. The commercial fur trapping industry simply doesn't have a place anymore. The world was a way different place in 1890 than it is today. It's an industry that relies on killing animals. Literally tens of thousands of unsold pelts every year. The fur markets are terrible. Coyote pelts have crashed. Lynx pelts have crashed. That's not a full-time job. That's not a part-time job. That's a hobby. Regulations really, truly are archaic and outdated at this point. There are limits to everything you take away from the province of Alberta if you're an outdoorsman, except a trapper. There is a lot of secrecy behind the commercial fur trapping industry that we need to uncover and expose. My first real exposure to the realities of trapping happened when I was in the Yukon back in the late 1990s. And I encountered a trapper and I ended up just asking a thousand questions. And he invited me into his house and we went to his barn and all around his yard. I remember specifically him mentioning that he had taken nine wolverines one winter. And I thought, geez, that seems like a lot. They let you take that many. He said, oh yeah, you know, and the next year I didn't take any because I thought I'd taken too many the previous winter. And I thought, you know, it's kind of odd. Is there no government coming in and saying, whoa, you took nine wolverines, that's way too many. And so I started looking into it. And that's when I started really becoming interested in it and thinking, you know, what is the regulation here? I remember the first time that I learned that a wolf pack had been basically wiped out on the edge of Banff National Park, all by one trapper. And I thought, geez, how can one person have control over a pack that has been protected basically its entire life and then it steps outside of the park for 10% of its time and one trapper takes out the whole pack. And that got me really digging into things more and more. When I started doing my wolf projects in 2007, by the time I got to the Kootenay Wolf Project, which was 2013 to 2018, I was really very, very aware that these Kootenay wolves were leaving the park to the south down by Invermere and Radium in British Columbia. And that they were exposed to both trophy hunters and in particular to trappers that were trying to bait them outside the park and to control their numbers. And very specifically so that they would have more prey to hunt. That was always the argument is, well, they're taking all the deer and elk, all of our deer and elk and moose. We need to control their numbers and get them down. Well, these were actually wolves that were living 75% to 80% of the time within the protected national park, Kootenay National Park, occasionally branching up into Banff and into Yoho. And then that 20% of the deep winter going right down into the middle of trapping territory, right when the trappers are all there during trapping season. And so I remember countless times driving along some of those back roads south of Kootenay National Park and just my heart, my throat, wondering as I approached these snare saturation sites where there's killing neck snares all over. I counted 32 once in one of the trappers bait sites and he's just gone and taken roadkill and he puts it into this site and then all around it is all these snares set up. And I remember every single time going in there, my heart, my throat, just thinking, what am I going to find this time? Trapping industry promotes the fact that trapping is a key wildlife management tool to control predator populations. And when you go and talk to someone like Dr. Adrian Treves, you find that the truth is actually much different than what the trapping industry is saying. Take wolves or coyotes or many of the other social canids, members of the wild dog family, they are generally territorial in their packs, right? A wolf pack is territorial, which means it defends its territory from neighboring packs. And therefore, within a territory, the number of wolves doesn't vary much except when pups are produced, but then they disperse out of the territory. So take, for instance, the largest wolf pack ever observed in Wisconsin, numbered 11 or 12 individuals at its peak. And it remained that size for more than a decade. So that's incredible stability in abundance of wolves within that territory. And therefore, there's absolutely no need for humans to control the abundance of wolves in a given territory. Now, of course, wolves create new territory, so they spread geographically. Humans make value judgments about where they want wolves to live, right or wrong. That's not the same as controlling the abundance of an animal population. So no, I do not believe predator control is needed to control overabundance of top predators like wolves or coyotes, because they control their own numbers through territorial defense. The big apex predators like grizzly bears, cougars, wolves, wolverine, the animals that kind of get blamed for everything. You know, we get a drop in a deer population, oh, the wolves did it. You know, caribou, dino, oh, it's the grizzlies are killing all the calves. You know, instead of looking at the much bigger picture of the effects of industry and habitat loss, all these much larger things that are the actual causes. All you hear about is how much livestock is killed by wolves. And they do kill a few livestock, very few livestock. Another just total misinformation is the damage that wolves do to big game, you know, deer, elk, and moose. It's not true, not in my world. When we reintroduced wolves, you know, 26 years ago, since that time, statewide elk herds in Idaho, Montana, Wyoming have all increased. There's more elk today than there was 26 years ago in these states. Yet all you hear about is all the damage wolves do to livestock and big game. It's just not true. A lot of our wildlife agencies are not what they used to be. And this led to trappers to believe that they are the wildlife managers of our populations in the bush. Trappers are not wildlife managers. It's not because you took a course on humane trapping given by trappers, some of them don't even have the concept of humaneness. It's not because you have paid 50 bucks, you became a trapper, that suddenly, you know, you're the great steward of the land. It's years, years of living with wildlife. In the three-day trapping certification course I took, there was virtually no information given regarding the science, biology, or any training in what wildlife management means. There's also no discussion of how a neck snare can cause an animal to needlessly suffer. In fact, jellyhead, which is actually horrific for an animal to suffer through, was simply described as ugly and gross to deal with. When the instructor talked about setting leg hole traps, it was emphasized to make sure the trap was secured properly so that the animal, when trying to escape, could not drag it behind them. Now, this wasn't set out a concern for any suffering the animal would be going through. Rather, it would be very bad for public relations if someone saw it. The instructor literally said those antis would have a field day when that happens. Wildlife biologists have done a degree at university, did a master, and a PhD. They are trained to analyze data gathered from animals. And some of those animals are provided to us by trappers, and we study the carcasses. But the trapper does not have the qualification to decide how many animals of the species should be especially when you have species whose home range encompasses two or three trap lines. A wolverine can have a home range of 400 square kilometers. Well, if a trapper decides to kill all the wolverine that he can find, he will impact on other trappers, but he could also remove all the wolverine of a region. And this is the problem we have with programs where snares are being used to kill wolves, and we remove animals like wolverine, and then we end up with a vacuum in the population. You talk about managing the wild animals, managing all these species, but when pelt prices go up, like when lynx used to be extraordinarily high, $800 to $1,000 per pelt, people were out trapping lynx. And now when the pelt prices fall, there's not as many people trapping lynx. And so the trappers say to me, it would be expensive for us to go out on our trap lines to catch animals if we're not going to get much for their pelts. Well, then what kind of management is that? There is no management then if you're just going to trap when the pelt prices are up. The general theme among trapping associations all across Canada is reflected in the Alberta Trapping Association's mission statement, which says to ensure that trapping continues in Alberta as a way of life that promotes respect for wildlife and stewardship of the land. If that is actually true, then trappers are showing their so-called respect for wildlife by choking animals to death with neck snares, or in the case of beavers and muskrats, drowning them. The truth is trapping organizations have misled the general public, and they've somehow convinced governments, in Canada at least, that strangling, drowning, or starving an animal to death is showing respect for wildlife. And by doing that, they deserve to be considered stewards of the land. There's this notion that trappers are environmental stewards and that the trapping industry contributes a great deal to conservation. And while there's no doubt that a trapping skill like live trapping can be a very useful tool for scientific research, there is also no doubt that the commercial fur trapping industry itself is geared towards killing animals and getting those pelts to market. And no matter how you spin it, that has absolutely nothing to do with conservation. Now that doesn't mean that there aren't trappers out there that are great conservationists and even whistleblowers, but the trapping industry is focused on killing animals and selling their furs. In fact, if the many millions of taxpayer dollars spent every year on subsidies and supporting trapping organizations was directed to actual wildlife professionals and biologists to gather this information, we could get it without the use of killing neck snares. Trapping is not stewardship. It's a private activity done for private profit or benefit. The focus of the trapping industry is to trap, to kill animals, and to make sure that their trappers are getting some money from it and that any bad public relations stories, a dog getting caught in a snare, things like that, don't make it into the public eye. When has killing an animal ever protected the survivors of that same population? The only example that might come to mind is if one kills a wild animal that has an infectious disease that is going to lead to a pandemic. Otherwise, killing is not conservation. It's simply the opposite. If tomorrow fur trapping was to stop altogether, that won't be the end of the world. Population won't crash. They won't die of diseases because suddenly they are not being trapped. I mean, I can bring you places where the national parks are extremely large, where populations are never being trapped, and wildlife is still what it is, wildlife. They don't become bloodthirsty, they don't invade villages and kill babies like it is proposed by some trappers, you know. When you've got a lot of animals, too many, nature will decide, you know. Parvovirus, rabies, distemper, that's what nature does. Wildlife are not there to be managed. I suppose you could say they could be monitored and watched over as a government watch over its citizens. We could, I suppose, set more areas aside as protected areas. We should monitor things like disease. We monitor, we don't manage. They are autonomous communities, they don't need managing. My book is called The Subjugation of Canadian Wildlife, Failures of Principle and Policy, our beliefs about wildlife. Fashioned in early Greek and Roman cultures and believed that man is separated from other creatures by the faculty of reason. And because we can think, and because we can reason better than anything else, this enables us to exercise power over everything else. And by right, because the natural chain of being puts the creator first, and then us, and then animals, and then plants. That's reason, and we believe that to this day. And I concentrate on government policy mainly, and I argue that while wildlife management in Canada, conducted by trained professionals who take their job seriously, they do not support wildlife because their belief systems don't allow it. So it's not what they do, it's what they believe which informs what they do. And I argue that as long as that belief system is in place, the plight of wildlife and biodiversity and ecological integrity will spiral downwards. The prevailing system for wildlife management is trapped in a pre-1950s view that humans can dominate nature. This is called anthropocentrism, which puts humans at the center of the universe as the most important and highest priority species. That's both unfair and unscientific. The vast majority of the public are not hunters, or anglers, or trappers. Rather, they hold mutualistic values towards wildlife, meaning they look at wild animals as part of our moral community that we have an obligation to protect and preserve. Trappers and their associations often use the word humane to describe and even justify trapping and the devices they use. So what exactly about trapping for fur is humane? The AIHTS describes humane as death taking less than three minutes, which we know is actually very rare, especially with larger fur bearers like coyotes and wolves. And even just looking at our own pets like cats, dogs, we know that all these animals have emotions and they do feel happiness, joy, empathy. And in the case of trapping, they also feel pain, suffering, and fear as they die. So exactly where is the humanity in that? What we need to do is see wildlife for the individuals that they are. Every animal behaves differently. More of that sort of thinking where we see them as an individual, not just as an object of curiosity or even something to be feared or loved or even admired, just someone out there following their own life course, crawling through life in the best way they know how, like we are. We have written wildlife policies that really don't benefit the wildlife at all. They benefit humans and they are strictly written to benefit, in particular, trappers and hunters. The Alberta government told me when they do their review of trapping regulations, they actually require input from the Alberta Trappers Association on how to refine the regulations for the upcoming year. So they asked the coyote about the security of the hen house. I've got a Bachelor of Science in Wildlife Management, but I have no say in how wolf populations are managed. And yet anybody that goes and takes a three-day course on trapping, not on wildlife management, but on trapping, can then go out and control all the predators in an area that they buy a fur management license for. I just find that ridiculous that we are leaving the wildlife management in the hands of these very small percentage of people that are consumptive users. They are using this wildlife as a resource. Within the Alberta government, for instance, the people that are managing our wildlife, there are hunters and trappers. And so, of course, they are going to be sympathetic to the trapping industry and to the needs and wants of the trapping industry, particularly more than they would be to any non-consumptive users that don't view wildlife as a resource to be used in that same manner. So this is going to be part of this overall reform that is going to have to happen at some point. And right now, the only place we really truly see it is in California, where California now has more non-consumptive users, hikers, wildlife photographers, birdwatchers, on their fish and game board than they do hunters and trappers and consumptive users. And that really balances and shows more what we see in actual society. In actual society, fewer than 5% of Albertans, for instance, hunt, fewer than 1% trap, yet they are the ones that are on the boards and that are helping make the decisions, and they're the ones that are embedded within government. And so it's just going to be an overall reform. It's going to come from pressure from the people, from the public, and from society to change how we look at this. And being able to look down at California and say, see, we know it can work and we know it can happen. So that's what gives people like me hope when we come into this and we start advocating for change. Future generations will blame us for our failures to protect the trust. They already blame us. I see young people every semester I teach in the university, and the vast, vast majority of those young people are confused, perplexed by the behavior of the previous generations. They don't understand us. They're frustrated by our lack of awareness and care for the environment, and they already are blaming us. It's just a matter of years until our generation is looked upon as despoilers of nature. There's got to be change. We've got to affect change. The way to do it graciously would be to demand higher regulations, tighter regulations, more regulations in general from the Alberta government. I want to affect change in a big way. I want to take a bigger swing. To me, if 65,000 animals were killed last year in Alberta, why don't we send 65,000 emails? Let's have everyone who cares and everyone wants to see change send an email to the minister, because one petition with 65,000 signatures, that's one thing. I would like to demand change person by person to show the government what individual voters think. That could work beyond Alberta. That can work throughout Canada or any of the other countries that allow trapping. We need to speak up individually on behalf of the animals being choked to death to the governments in power for them to affect change. We hope that this documentary series on trapping has educated you, but we also hope that it's got you fired up to demand change. Commercial fur trapping is a dying industry that has to be reformed, starting with a total ban on killing neck snares. The bottom line is, whether it takes five seconds, five hours or five days, 100% of our wild animals that are killed for their fur are either strangled, starved, beaten, crushed, drowned or shot. Is this really a hobby that needs to continue? We don't think so. We need your voice to give our a voice.