WHITINGHAM — A new bill, H.191, gives Vermont legislators the opportunity to banish the cruel and widely despised practice of recreational trapping from our state.
Steel-jaw leghold traps cause gruesome injuries, prolonged agony, and death for an untold number of wild and domestic animals in Vermont.
Trapped animals may die of blood loss, dehydration, hypothermia, or predation, or may chew or twist off a limb, paw or digit to escape. Traps also drown animals, a particularly inhumane and horrifying death for river otters and beavers who can hold their breath for eight minutes or more.
Body-gripping traps are designed to kill quickly when two rotating jaws close on an animal's neck or chest but often just slam onto the animal's abdomen or other body part and cause unimaginable suffering.
And no matter their intended target, traps are indiscriminate and frequently capture family pets, hunting dogs, imperiled species, and raptors.
Last year Vermont legislators introduced a trapping ban bill similar to H.191, but it was watered down, and in the end it called for developing a set of trapping “best management practices.”
Those guidelines, proposed by trappers, still allow for an unacceptable level of pain and suffering for trapped animals and don't adequately protect Vermont pets from accidental capture. In effect, last year's go-around accomplished little more than to demonstrate that a full ban on this practice is still needed.
In 2022, Vermont Fish and Wildlife also contracted a poll to assess public attitudes toward trapping. Initially, its results seemed to indicate strong support among Vermonters. But then an open records search revealed that pollsters noted a 12% increase in Vermonter support for “trapping” when it was preceded by the term “regulated,” implying to those surveyed that standards for trapping effectiveness and humaneness actually exist. They don't.
How would Vermonters have responded to that poll if they had been given the cold, unvarnished truth about trapping? We already know the answer to that question for the nation as a whole, with 74% of Americans saying they oppose the practice and 10 U.S. states now severely restricting or prohibiting it. More than 100 countries worldwide have also prohibited the use of leghold traps.
Vermont's wildlife is worth far more to the state alive than dead, with wildlife watchers, national park visitors, and non-consumptive users outnumbering and outspending hunters and trappers by a wide margin.
And there's no economic value in trapping animals to sell to a dying fur industry. Demand for fur is bottoming out.
The actions and preferences of an extremely small - and shrinking - segment of the population should not jeopardize the safety and well-being of our wildlife and pets.
Vermont legislators should pass H.191 to protect them from the suffering inflicted by recreational trapping.