COLUMN ONE : Canada’s Fur Trade Feels Chill : Thousands of Indians make a living from trapping, but animal rights activists are gaining ground. Reacting to protests, officials promote a more ‘humane’ trap.

The pilot slams the door of his single-engine Beaver. “Any nervous fliers?” he calls toward the back of the plane.

“Not yet,” Joe Mackenzie yells back as the plane idles noisily at the edge of Great Slave Lake, in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Outside, the wind is picking up, and a few flakes are drifting down from a leaden sky. A skin of ice coats the plane’s pontoons. There are apt to be snowstorms between here and Mackenzie’s destination, Rae Lake, 150 miles to the north-northwest.

Mackenzie can’t afford to be queasy about bush planes and bad weather. It is his lot in life to crisscross Canada’s roadless, frozen north, touching down in tiny, isolated settlements, spreading wherever he can the gospel of “humane trapping.”

“If we don’t get through to people, the whole market could collapse,” he says.

Far to the south, animal welfare activists are gaining ground in their crusade against northern Canada’s economic mainstay--trapping and fur. One recent study found that almost 80% of Americans now think it is wrong to kill an animal to make a fur coat.

In Nevada County, Calif., voters have passed a referendum banning all steel-jawed traps within county limits. In England, a bastion of animal-rights activism, fur sales have fallen off by about 75% over the past 10 years. The European Community has been considering a law requiring labels on imported furs, warning potential buyers that the animals may have been trapped, not raised on a ranch.

Even in parts of Canada, a country that owes its exploration to the Edwardian craze for beaver hats, anti-trapping groups have taken off. Though most stop at simple fur-salon pickets and advertising campaigns, some are espousing sabotage: In Edmonton, Alberta, people claiming to be members of an underground group, the Animal Liberation Front, have been spray-painting fur salons and promising more vandalism to come. Furriers across Canada take the threat seriously; they say militant animal lovers elsewhere have destroyed laboratory experiments where animals are sacrificed for research--and have gone so far as to torch Kentucky Fried Chicken stands and smash McDonalds’ windows.

“Enlightened people today say no to fur,” says Jerye Mooney, Los Angeles coordinator of a nonviolent anti-fur group, the Fund for Animals. “Slave trading used to be acceptable. I would equate the two.”

Mackenzie, a Dogrib Indian and a deputy game warden here in the Northwest Territories, sees things differently. He spent his childhood on his family’s trap line, and he tends to grow quiet and look a long way into the distance when talking about those times.

One of his earliest memories is of lying on a mound of soft caribou skins at sunrise in the doorway of his family’s tent on a March morning. It was near the end of the trapping season, and as he lay in the warm fur, watching the sun come up and melt the ice on a huge boulder outside, hundreds of northbound ducks suddenly drifted down out of the sky, like an omen.

“It’s really a good time, eh?” he says. “Springtime. It’s just beautiful.”

When Mackenzie turned 8, he was jerked out of his village and packed off to an English-speaking schoolhouse in Yellowknife. The shock was so great, he says, that it took him three years just to pass the first grade. He barely made it through high school. His experience was not atypical among the Dogrib, one of a half a dozen northern Canadian tribes that together make up the Dene Nation.

“Do you know that there’s Dene kids walking around today with ghetto blasters, listening to rock ‘n’ roll?” he asks. “They’ve lost touch.”

Indeed, the Dene are plagued by suicide, alcoholism and school dropout rates way out of whack with the rest of Canada--but Mackenzie, by contrast, is reasonably comfortable with one foot in the white man’s world, the other in the native. He thinks it was those formative years in the bush that has helped him keep his balance. And he worries about the younger Indians growing up without benefit of an early life on the land.

“If you’ve done it, you’ve got roots, no matter how many other influences there may be on you,” he says.

And so it is that when Mackenzie takes off this morning, fortified with several cups of strong black coffee, he has several cardboard cartons of “humane traps” stashed in the back of his chartered bush plane.

An hour later, when his plane will touch down on the partly frozen waters of Rae Lake, he will set off to find trappers willing to trade in their old traps and ideas for his new, “humane” equipment and philosophy. As he sees it, the more he can persuade native trappers to change, the more their ancient ways will be able to stay the same.

There are all sorts of animal-welfare groups in the world, espousing all manner of ideologies. Some are made up of hard-line vegetarians who oppose the killing of animals for any purpose, including food or medical research.

Others take a milder stand, accepting the butchering of meat but opposing the infliction of suffering on animals for mere fashion’s sake. Whatever their differences, though, animal-welfare groups are in agreement on one thing: the leg-hold trap is Public Enemy No. 1.

A leg-hold trap does just what its name suggests. An animal steps into it, it springs shut, and the animal’s leg is caught.

Since the blow doesn’t kill the creature, it is apt to jump and twist around in a frenzy until it gradually succumbs to exhaustion, dehydration and shock. Some animals with weak ankle joints manage to wrench their paws clean off and escape. (Wildlife biologists dispute tales of animals chewing their own feet off.)

Videos of animals hopping pathetically in leg-hold traps are excellent ammunition for the animal-welfare movement--and a source of tremendous anxiety to the Canadian government. Canada is the world’s third-largest exporter of fur. About 90% of its production is shipped abroad. About 100,000 Canadians--many of them Indians in remote, impoverished settlements--make a living of sorts from trapping.

It has been estimated that if the fur market were to crash, and all the trappers of the Northwest Territories were forced to stop killing animals and move to town, it would cost $25 million a year just to make up for the meat they would lose--to say nothing of their income from fur. That can vary wildly, but in a good season, a couple of months, a trapper can make as much as $10,000.

“That is about one-sixth of the territorial government’s annual budget,” notes Joanne Barnaby, executive director of the Dene Cultural Institute in Yellowknife, of the $25 million figure. “It would break this government to replace the country food that people harvest with imported southern beef.”

That isn’t an idle fancy. Canadian officials have already witnessed one animal rights victory and they know it exacted a high human cost. In 1983, after years of international protest, animal rights activists persuaded the European Economic Community to ban all imports of baby seal pelts--the so-called whitecoats. The slaughter of baby seals across northern Canada halted immediately--but so vehemently did the protesters press their point that consumers stopped buying mature seal pelts, too, and the entire sealing industry collapsed.

That left the ice-dwelling, seal-hunting Inuit, or Eskimos, of Greenland and northern Canada with virtually no means of making a living.

“Their lives have been ruined, and the result has been suicide, drugs, alcohol and murder,” rails Canadian popular historian Pierre Berton. “That’s what’s going on in the high Arctic.”

And that, fear the Dene, is what could happen next to them.

“I hate to use the term ‘cultural genocide,’ but that’s what’s happening here,” says Jim Bourque, the Northwest Territories’ Deputy Minister for Renewable Resources, himself a Metis, or Canadian of mixed Indian and white ancestry. “We have the highest suicide rate in the country here. People just can’t cope with this kind of change. For social, economic and spiritual reasons, we have to be in touch with the land.”

Hoping to silence the southern, urban, white complaints about leg-hold traps, Canadian officials and furriers have launched a search for a trap that kills the animal instantly--”humanely.” Some of the new devices look like metal cans and boxes: when a small animal--a marten or a wild mink, for example--crawls inside them to get at a piece of bait, a metal bar snaps down, breaking the animal’s neck.

Then there are the conibear traps, named for their inventor, Frank Conibear. Conibear traps consist of a lot of heavy wire loops and springs; when sprung, they too are meant to break an animal’s back.

All this marks an improvement over the leg-hold traps, but the search for a true “humane trap” isn’t over. For one thing, the quick-kill traps invented so far won’t work on large animals, such as foxes or lynx. And even the existing small-animal traps get mixed reviews from users.

Some models are bulky and difficult to carry by the dozens over a trap line, which may be a hundred miles long. Some look so obvious that animals rarely venture into them. And finally, the animal-welfare activists aren’t necessarily placated by the “humane trap” concept.

“The conibear trap is supposed to be a quick-kill trap, but I’ve seen videos where it’s not,” says the Fund for Animals’ Mooney. “I don’t believe a humane trap exists.”

Such remarks exasperate Mackenzie. He remembers giving one presentation at which an old Dogrib trapper started complaining bitterly about the new conibear traps.

“He said, ‘They’re giving us something more complicated than a leg-hold trap to keep animals from suffering, but what about us? We’re already out trying to make a living, setting these cumbersome traps when it’s 40 below.’ It made sense.”

At Rae Lake, Mackenzie’s plane splashes down onto the water and makes for a dock extending beyond a sheet of ice already forming at the shore. A Dogrib settlement, Rae Lake sits on a barren spit of land extending out into the water.

About 200 people live here, some in log cabins, others in prefab wooden houses provided by the government. Every November, when the trapping season officially starts, they all clear out of town and make for the trap lines. Whole families go together, traveling by snowmobile and sleeping rough, in tents banked with snow.

Already on this October day, a group of men are down at the dock, loading snowmobiles onto a rented plane in preparation for their lengthy forays into the bush. Here and there around town, people have arranged poles tepee-style behind their houses, for drying caribou meat and spreading out hides. Laundry flaps in the frigid air.

On the dirt roads winding between the houses, teen-age boys lope along, sporting Reebok high-tops and baseball caps. One old man is hauling home a carton of groceries from the general store: $3-a-bag carrots and $1.15-apiece grapefruit, flown in by bush plane.

Mackenzie unloads his cartons of conibear traps and begins his rounds, stopping first at the home of Therese and Louis Zoe. The Zoes live in one of the two-story prefabs, furnished with warm carpeting, a wood stove, and--oddly in the Dene north--a weaving showing the symbol of the ancient Aztecs, an eagle with a serpent in its beak, landing on a cactus. Two fox pelts hang from nails on the wall. There is no plumbing; all water here comes from the lake.

Louis Zoe speaks little English, but his wife is happy to give her views on trapping.

“In the olden days, the people in this community used to live in tents,” she says. “They weren’t tents like those canvas ones--they were hide tents. They traveled to wherever the caribou were. With dog teams, they used to travel all the way up to the bare lands”--the tundra.

“You don’t do it like that any more,” she adds, with a nod toward a field radio on a shelf in the corner. Her husband traded in his dog sled for a snowmobile in 1972, she says. “But we still live our cultural life. People still make dried meat. Some people still make their own canoes out of the birch bark. In this community, people live just on caribou, fish and ducks. The only income people get is from selling furs.”

Therese Zoe has heard that in the south, some people oppose the killing of animals for fur or meat. To her, vegetarian is utterly unimaginable. She can’t even pronounce the word.

“I don’t really understand this vegentary,” she says. “It looks like they’re just starving themselves. Just eating plants? Our ancestors, they lived on animals, and we’re still living that life. If a vegentary came into our community and said, ‘No more trapping,’ I don’t think our people here would accept it. How would we live?”

After visiting a few houses with his conibear traps and his message, Mackenzie walks over to the local community center for a meeting. Here, men have set up tables and folding chairs in the gymnasium, between a basketball hoop and a volleyball net. A sign on the bulletin board urges all trappers to come to the general store for their leg-hold traps.

The meeting kicks off with a discussion of how to fight forest fires, then moves on to fur prices and some new trapping regulations the government will impose, in hopes of brightening the industry’s image. The men listen intently: starting in January, Mackenzie says, trappers will have to check their traps more frequently every 72 hours to make sure no animals are being held alive. Currently, checks may be made as long as a week apart.

By 1992, the use of leg-hold traps on small animals will be banned. In anticipation, trappers are to start trading in their small leg-hold traps for the quick-kill conibear traps. The villagers nod, but there is skepticism on their faces.

“They don’t want change,” says Mackenzie afterward. “They don’t understand.”

But then a gray-haired villager, Harry Simpson, speaks up. He says that a game warden gave him a conibear trap last year and he tried it out.

“It wasn’t bad,” he tells the other villagers in Dogrib. He takes one of Mackenzie’s conibear traps out of the box and shows the other men how he used it, setting Mackenzie’s glove on the trigger. The trap snaps shut with a resounding bang. All the men chuckle, then walk over to the boxes and pull out conibear traps for themselves.

Mackenzie smiles--Simpson has been an unexpected ally. The meeting ends, and the men walk back to their houses. Mackenzie heads down to the dock, where the plane is parked. The pilot appears, climbs in and taxis across the water for takeoff.

From the air, it is easy to see why the government is keen on finding ways for northern people to go on trapping. For mile after mile, as far as the eye can see, there is nothing but barren rock, scoured clean by the glaciers of millenniums ago.

Wherever the bedrock dips, water accumulates and becomes a lake. Wherever it has developed a crack, hearty pine and birch have managed to take root. Rock, water, scrubby trees--that is all there is here. There is no topsoil to farm, no lush timberland to log, no meadows or prairie to graze.

In short, there is no way to live here without killing animals. This is a time of heightened native awareness and activism in Canada. Few government officials these days are willing to tell the Indians, who have already been dislocated many times by whites, that they will have to move away once again.

“We all have to attach ourselves to something in life,” says Deputy Minister Bourque. “Some people attach themselves to religion. Some go to the unions. We attach ourselves to the land.”