Humane Traps Key to Preserving Fur Industry

Their mission sounds like an oxymoron: devising traps to kill animals as humanely as possible.

Using high-tech methods approved by a national council of veterinarians, a research team in this small prairie town is testing a variety of lethally named contraptions. For example, there’s the C-120 Magnum, a “single-strike rotating jaw trap with pitchfork trigger.”

Animal-rights militants denounce the work as ghastly. They also oppose it because it is a crucial part of the strategy employed by Canada’s government and fur industry in the global battle over the fur trade.

Canada is playing a pivotal role in a long-running dispute between the European Union and the major trapping nations. The EU has been threatening for years to ban fur imports from Canada, Russia and the United States unless they outlaw all leg-hold traps, which many animal-rights groups consider barbaric.

Canada has negotiated a compromise it hopes will be ratified by the EU in June. It has agreed to phase out steel leg-hold traps over the next four years, but would allow trappers to continue using padded leg-hold traps while international standards are developed for improved trapping methods.

Those standards would be based in large measure on the research being done in Vegreville, 65 miles east of Edmonton, at a government complex housing various agricultural, wildlife and environmental programs.

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Since 1985, the Trap Effectiveness Project has spent more than $8 million on developing “humane trapping systems.”

Larry Roy, the project director, said countering an EU ban is one of the top priorities of his 11-member team.

The team tests its traps in a five-acre compound where coyotes, martens and other fur-bearing animals are kept in large pens meant to simulate natural conditions. Human contact is kept to a minimum, and infrared video monitoring is used to observe the animals’ interaction with the traps.

“There’s nothing else like this in the world,” Roy said. “We’ve done more work than anybody.”

The researchers try to minimize the number of live animals killed in testing. One new technique is to use a simulated trap on a computer. Roy showed a visitor a computer-generated animation in which a marten’s neck is broken when it nibbles at a baited trap attached to a log leaned against a tree.

Traps are tested for practicality and effectiveness. Those designed to kill an animal must consistently hit vital spots--the head, neck or chest--and should render 70% of animals insensible to pain in less than five minutes. Current so-called kill traps mostly wound animals, which can linger for hours or days in great pain before dying.

A different standard is being worked out for restraining traps, which hold a live animal until the trapper returns. Researchers are seeking to measure the trauma a trapped animal suffers, and develop traps that can hold the trauma to an acceptable level.

An animal-care council that includes veterinarians monitors the methods used by the trap-testing team, but animal-rights activists still criticize the Vegreville project.

“These are pretty ghoulish kinds of experiments,” said Ainslie Willock of the Animal Alliance of Canada.

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At the center of the dispute is the leg-hold trap, which in the past clamped tight on an animal’s leg with toothed metal jaws. Canada has outlawed the toothed models for many years, but animal-rights groups still display them at rallies and in advertisements.

Nontoothed leg-hold traps are still used in Canada for a few larger species like lynx and fox. But a large majority of the 1 million animals trapped annually for fur in Canada are caught in killing traps, said Alison Beal, executive director of the Fur Institute of Canada.

“The animal welfare people have an emotional allergy to leg-hold traps that’s bred out of ignorance,” she said.

The tentative agreement between Canada and the EU would set international standards for acceptable trapping methods, species by species.

The Vegreville team has approved traps for eight species, including an underwater model that catches and drowns beavers. A restraining trap has been developed for red foxes that has neoprene padding on the metal jaws and a shock-absorbing spring in the trap’s chain to prevent ligament injury once a fox is caught.

The research is part of an aggressive, well-financed campaign by Canada’s fur industry to head off an EU import ban. One of its best weapons has been lobbying in Europe by Inuit and Indian leaders who note that half of Canada’s 80,000 trappers are indigenous peoples who would be devastated by a ban.

Native delegations, including one led by World War II veterans, toured Europe to denounce the ban as a potential violation of a U.N. covenant protecting the livelihoods of aboriginal peoples.

“We helped liberate the European countries when they were really in need,” said Gilbert MacLeod, an Indian from Saskatchewan who fought in Belgium and France. “Now we are in need, and we’re coming to them to ask them to consider our cause.”

The Canadian government and fur industry believe they are making headway in the battle for public opinion, depicting trapping as a time-honored way of managing wildlife populations and using a renewable resource.

“Trappers have to get a license,” said Beal, the trade group director. “They are not people blundering about without a clue of what they’re doing, just sort of killing things,”

Beal expressed appreciation for the government’s efforts on behalf of trappers, saying lessons had been learned after lobbying by animal-rights groups nearly crushed the Canadian sealing industry in the 1980s.

“From the prime minister on down, Canadian officials are doing a masterful job keeping our trade open,” she said.

Complicating the dispute is a division within the European Union. EU environment ministers, who deal closely with animal-rights groups, favor barring fur imports. But trade ministers support the compromise that would allow continued use of some leg-hold traps.

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Both Canada and the United States, which hasn’t yet endorsed the compromise, have threatened to lodge a complaint with the World Trade Organization if a ban is imposed.

Willock of the Animal Alliance is optimistic that the European Parliament will demand that the compromise be scrapped in favor of a tougher line on leg-hold traps.

“The fur industry is worried sick about Europe,” she said. “If the ban is put into place, it sends the message that all fur is cruel.”

Willock said anti-fur activists worry that the fur market might boom in Russia and China but believe its heyday in the West is over.

“This is an industry that doesn’t have a future,” she said. “It has lost its market niche.”

The fur industry says export figures show otherwise. After a bleak period in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, exports have surged back. Canada’s exports of fur garments rose 45% last year to $90 million, and exports of raw furs were up 36% to $100 million, the Canadian Fur Council says.

Alan Herscovici, the council’s director of strategic development, attributed the upsurge to better global economic conditions and innovation by fur designers.

“A ban would be a serious blow for everybody,” Herscovici said. “If we’re going to get into arbitrary trade bans based on pseudo-science, then our whole world trading system is in trouble.”