With the lovely full Beaver Moon earlier this month. It’s official. We’re in beaver-trapping season. Historically the winter months were chosen so their fur would be at its thickest and the pelts worth most. Also the ice and snow makes them easier to track. This article from Cornwall, Ontario, highlights the risks that these traps can have for other (more valued) animals.
Wyatt Walsh was walking his dog in Guindon Park last week when he almost got trapped. He unknowingly stepped on a beaver trap, but fortunately, it had already been set off. “If it hadn’t been disengaged, it would have gotten my dog.”
The horrors! A cruel, inhumane trap used to maim and kill an unwanted pest nearly injured an animal that people choose on purpose! Oh the humanity! Fortunately Wyatt and his pooch got away safely and the city agreed to put up “killing fields” signs to warn hapless pedestrians.
City parks and landscaping supervisor Laurie Weatherall said there are “two or three” traps being used in Guindon Park, over the past few weeks. Weatherall said they initially had concerns about erecting signs as they feared it could attract unwanted attention to the traps. As for the traps, Weatherall said they aren’t located directly on the trails.
Did you catch that? We would have warned people about the risk but some crazy beaver-huggers might have gotten upset if we tipped them off. It is hard to kill beavers when your busy getting angry phone calls. You can bet these are leg hold traps, too, so there’s no need to check them often. The dead animal will just stay put until you can get to it.
Expect that the snap of leg hold traps, or the clink of conibear, or even the rattle of hancock (live until shot through the head with a .22) traps takes some 5-10 beavers a week, per trapper. Several hundred a season. Although no one really knows the number because no one tallys the bodies. In season there’s no need to report how many were taken. If you imagine every community like Cornwall or Oshawa or Martinez taking out 2-3 colonies of beavers multiplied by 50 states and several hundred municipalities the death count is fairly staggering.
Meanwhile, cities bemoan their decreasing rainfall, hurt from their lost salmon season, or worry about the quality of the water they’re filling with pesticides and fertilizers. They keep dutifully writing checks to their scrubby trappers and begrudgingly put out warning signs that no beavers can read. Then they wonder why the population rebounds in a year or two and the check needs to be bigger.
Here’s the only good part of the article:
Walsh believes the trap he encountered had already been set off intentionally by someone else and placed next to a culvert, where he came across it.
