Emily the Trapper is 26, smart, loves animals, and thinks your ideas about fur trapping are all wrong
Lamb has always found animals beautiful. She used to spend entire afternoons sitting in the hay feeder on her family’s Sundre-area farm when she was a girl just so she could see the cows up close when they came to eat. After graduating from high school, Lamb decided she wanted to be a veterinarian or a Fish and Wildlife officer. She eventually earned a diploma in Wildlife and Forestry Conservation online, then began an internship with the Cochrane Ecological Institute.
Joining the business as an outsider was a challenge for Lamb. So was being the first and only woman in the company. “You don’t expect a girl is going to be OK with going out and killing stuff,” she told me. Lamb found the physical demands gruelling. “It’s pretty intense work,” she said. “Tearing around with 70- or 80-pound beavers in your backpack for undeterminable distances. And setting traps with poundage enough to break your arms.” There is also, of course, the locker-room talk that comes with being the sole woman in a crew of men. “Trust me, I hear about a million beaver jokes a day,” she said with a laugh. She considers the ribbing good-natured. “Obviously, I am an easy-going gal.”
This is any trapping company’s wet dream. A cute, young, sympathetic girl they can push to the front of the line to put a humane face on their ghoulish activities. No wonder the paper dedicated 6 entire pages to her story. (No word yet on when it will run a 6 page story on beaver benefits, or the rodent rebound from trapping coyotes, or why wolves help rivers.) There’s no time for fluff pieces like that when we have a cute 26 year old voyageur to write about.
Trappers are rarely paid for these contributions. They do it because they share a common commitment to wildlife understanding and sustainability. This is something Lamb wants the public to understand. “All of us–hunters, trappers, environmentalists, tree-huggers, hippies–every one of us, in the end, wants there to be as big and as healthy a population of wildlife as possible. Period.”
The style of beaver trap Abercrombie and Lamb use is a “body-grip killing trap”–often called a Conibear trap after inventor Frank Conibear–which a beaver springs by swimming into it. The trap is powerful enough to break a person’s arm. “That’ll wreck you pretty good,” Lamb said. The Conibear’s loaded jaws will catch a beaver around the neck and fracture its spine while compressing the carotid artery in its neck. Death comes painlessly and instantaneously.2 “The animal is living his life the way he lives his life, doing what he does every day,” Lamb said. “Then he’s not.”
Why is it that if you say that beavers are good for fish or wildlife reporters have to talk to someone who thinks differently to present a balance – but if you say conibears never make wildlife suffer they just obediently write it down with a flourish? Is there nobody in Alberta who disagrees with Emily? I’m assuming from the 60+ comments that there are. Maybe you could have contacted Dr. Hood for a quote about the impact of trapping beaver on surrounding wildlife?
Furthermore, the selective trapping of overpopulated animals like beavers and coyotes sustains their numbers. Abercrombie “traps out” about half of the beaver lodges on Chip Lake. In this way, he doubles the resources available for the remaining colonies and reduces their competitive stress. “I am keeping the population at a consistent high level on the lake by employing trapping as a management tool.” Abercrombie told me that 10 years ago, without enough trapping on the lake, the beavers clear cut the trees off every island. “They literally ate themselves out of house and home.” Those that didn’t starve contracted parasitic infections due to overcrowding. Eventually, every one of Chip Lake’s 200 beavers died. Now, thanks to Abercrombie’s trapping, about 60 individuals reside on the lake, a little more than half of what he figures the area can support.
You do realize animals move locations right? I mean if they chop the trees in one lake they move to another lake while those trees are coppicing and coming back to life? If you drink all the beer in your refrigerator what do you do? I assume there are more trees at the lake than there are in Alhambra Creek. Its been 7 years and our beavers haven’t eaten themselves out of house and home or died of tularemia. I’m surprised the Alberta beaver species must be way more greedy.
“As a trapper, this is my responsibility,” Abercrombie said. “I do it as a steward on behalf of the citizens of Alberta. I manage the fur-bearer resource in this area. That’s what trappers do. The government doesn’t do it. The animal-rights people don’t do it. We do it.”
Oh pul-eeze. I can’t stand this much selfless patriotism without a martini. I’m reminded of a certain self-justifying poem by Oscar Wilde.
And all men kill the thing they love, By all let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword! Oscar Wilde
