Trappers never should be called sportsmen

There was something almost touching about Nicole DeMoranville’s opinion piece about trapping (BDN, Feb. 17-18) as she gathered enough bluster and bravado to try to defend the indefensible.

She calls her husband, the trapper, a sportsman. But trappers aren’t sportsmen and trapping isn’t sport. A primary tenet of sport is a clean victory or kill. Trappers cannot claim a clean kill because trapped animals struggle mightily for their lives. They struggle and they suffer. Any rational person, viewing this struggle, would feel compelled to help the animal. A trapper’s response is to stomp or bludgeon the animal to death. This is what trappers call “recreation” and something they want to teach their children.

Another primary tenet of sport is discrimination. Trapping does not discriminate. A trap may be set for a beaver, but any animal, including endangered and domestic ones may be caught and injured or killed. Catching “nontargets” is so common that trappers have adopted a new defense strategy to fend off criticism: instead of setting a trap for a target animal, they now talk of trapping for “suites” of animals. This means that any animal they catch is an animal they meant to catch.

In recent years, trappers have built a phony alliance with hunters by threatening the effects of the domino theory: “If they end trapping, hunting is next.” Most hunters don’t buy this. In my work as an animal protection activist, I have had conversations with literally hundreds of hunters and most of them all but hold their noses when they speak of trapping and trappers. Most trappers hunt, but most hunters wouldn’t consider trapping, usually because of the lack of sportsmanship inherent in the grisly practice of trapping. Other nondiscriminating and cowardly ways of killing animals, set guns and river seining, have long been outlawed, just as someday trapping, a crime against nature and already illegal in more than 80 nations and numerous states, will be universally outlawed.

DeMoranville’s column was the mother lode of trappers’ propaganda: it is their “duty, to manage them [wildlife] for their own well-being.” Right. We can tell how concerned trappers are for the well-being of the animals, outside of a surplus to “harvest,” by the way they treat the animals. More propaganda: trapping prevents disease. The Centers for Disease Control released a study debunking claims that trapping prevented the spread of rabies. In fact, trappers have been implicated in the spread of rabies in the East because they transplanted infected raccoons as “seed” for future “harvests.”

There are mechanical ways to mitigate or eliminate the problems beavers can cause with dam building. If Maine Inland Fisheries and Wildlife agents don’t give this information to landowners, it’s because they want to sell trapping licenses.

DeMoranville wags her finger at Dr. Geoffrey Gratwick for his humane act of civil disobedience, removing leghold traps, and says “shame on you” while she defends the inhumane acts of those who “love wildlife,” but gain pleasure and even money from the torture and suffering of wild animals.

Bravado isn’t going to make trapping a sport or trappers into sportsmen. It’s time to begin calling trappers by their right name: exterminators.

Susan Cockrell lives in Holden.