I feel that way about leg hold traps. Sickening.
Foot hold traps,
properly used, can be an effective and humane wildlife management tool. Misused, I agree...they are bad things.
A tooth-jawed trap is not legal anywhere in the USA, and I know of no trapper that would ever use one.
Extremist groups spread so much misinformation over the years that people get the impression that they are horribly torturous to an animal, they are not. The abuse comes when some yaahoo sets one and does not perform daily checks. Ya can't fix stupid, and IMO those who do such things should be chained to a tree and then left there for a few days...see how they like it.
NM, I've set hundreds of 'em, and caught hundreds of coyotes, and not once,
ever, did a coyote (or any other animal) even attempt to chew their foot off to escape. Yes, on occasion there is the "toenail catch", cause that's all you find in the trap, but that is a rarity as trap jaws have a built in gap when closed...the jaws are offset to prevent that kind of thing. I also would put eyes on my sets
every day...no matter the weather (or anything else)..come hell or high water I was going to do daily checks.
One example of their benefits: Had an area of about 10 sq. miles where there had been a healthy red fox population, and then the coyotes moved in and were killing off all the fox. The game dept. asked me remove as many coyotes as I could from the area, in hopes the red fox population would rebound. I took eleven coyotes from that area in less than ten days, and the next year pretty much the same. Those red fox numbers did rebound over the next few years, but when a peoples initiative passed Wa. State it banned the use of most all the traps, leaving "live catch" cage traps as the only option. Trying to get a coyote to walk into a cage trap is darned near impossible, and as a result those red fox are completely gone now, which sucks as I'd have loved to have my grandsons see them in the wild.
Foot holds also offer the trapper the option of releasing an unintended catch, such as a bobcat or fox when the season is closed. I've safely released dozens of unharmed bobcat, fox, and even coyotes, and yes, you best know what the hell you're doing if you're going to release a pissed off bobcat. If the skin was broken (a rarity) I'd spray their foot with an antiseptic spray to insure no infection happens, and then they head off on their merry way.
And that Sir is the truth...got absolutely no reason to lie to ya about it.
All that said, I gave up trapping nearly thirty years ago....just couldn't bring myself
to end the life of yet another animal. Last animal I trapped was a coyote that was hanging around a field next to a grassy area that my (then) 2 yo. daughter used to run around on. It was a beautiful female, and I gave her a hardcore speech about staying the hell away from my daughter, and then I let her go, unharmed. Happily, I never saw her again.
Newnan, I do understand your feelings about this. There's a limited number of states that still allow foot holds, but I seriously doubt that in another ten years if they will be legal anywhere. That would be fine with me.
