Campaigns
- Spring Rules Hearings and Conservation Congress County Meetings
- Bear Hunting - baiting and trapping
- Trapping and the steel-jaw leghold trap
Bear Hunting
Baiting:
"If animal rights outfits were to design a scheme for depicting hunters as stupid, lazy, and cruel, they couldn't come up with anything more effective than bearbaiting" (Audubon, Incite, Sept. 2005)
Wisconsin is one of 10 states that allow the appalling practice of bear baiting. Bear baiting involves leaving junk food in strategic locations in the woods, setting up a chair nearby, waiting for a bear to show up to eat, and then shooting the bear point-blank. Sound terrible? It is.
This is big business in Wisconsin, with many outfitters around the state making money off of tourists' desires to mount a bear's head on their wall. This bloodsport is a truly vile form of hunting and should be banned immediately. Getting a bear used to sugary food (says one Wisconsin outfitter, "Our primary bait is bread, doughnuts, buns, and pastries, to which we add liquid sugar or corn syrup") day after day so that the bear is cruelly shot after he/she comes to feed after peacefully eating is tragically brutal.
As Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura put it shortly before leaving office: "Going out there and putting jelly doughnuts down, and Yogi comes up and sits there and thinks he's found the mother lode for five days in a row and then you back-shoot him from a tree?...That ain't sport that's an assassination."
It's time to stop bear baiting in Wisconsin once and for all!
Hounding:
Wisconsin's other bloodsport involving bears is called "hounding." Hunters throughout the state breed and buy dogs (who typically live outdoors in small cages their entire lives) to participate in this gruesome activity.
Essentially, dogs are fitted with radio transmitter collars and set loose in the woods to chase bears. Bear hunters have no real control over their dogs as they tear through the fields and forests and onto people's property. Eventually the dogs chase a bear up a tree where it is then shot down by the hunter. If it is still alive, the dogs will finish it off.
The state of Wisconsin, ever obedient to the bear hunting lobby, even allows hunters to train their hounds on captive wildlife. Animals including raccoons, coyotes, rabbits and cougars are kept in small, fenced enclosures and chased, day after day, until viciously killed by hounds being "trained." Another form of canned hunting, this type of activity has no place in a civilized and compassionate society.
Trapping
According to the DNR's website, "trapping is a time-honored tradition going through a resurgence in Wisconsin partially due to serious education programs for trappers, biologists, and the public." Unfortunately, this violence is a family activity in Wisconsin, with a large number of youth participating in this cruel and unnecessary hobby (see the current picture on the DNR website of children holding a trapped animal: http://www.dnr.state.wi.us/org/land/wildlife/trap/. See also the pictures on the homepage of the Wisconsin Trappers Association: http://www.wistrap.org/)
Wisconsin allows the trapping of all types of animals, including coyotes, bobcats, beavers, raccoons, red and gray foxes, and otters. Using body-gripping traps including the terrible steel-jaw leghold trap, individuals throughout the state cruelly maim and slowly kill thousands upon thousands of defenseless wildlife every year. (For statistics regarding the number/type of animals killed in Wisconsin, please see the Animal Protection Institute's website.)
Additionally, trapping is an indiscriminate activity, and each year many "non-target animals" are killed in these incredibly painful and lethal traps. Dogs, cats, birds of prey, protected and endangered species, and other non fur-bearing animals are caught in traps likely as often as the targeted wildlife. Since the traps are very difficult to open by non-trappers, these animals often die of shock, blood loss, psychological trauma, thirst, and/or hypothermia before they can be rescued. Some chew off the extremities that are caught and crushed by the trap.
Besides being one of the cruelest activities in existence, trapping is wholly unnecessary. The Wisconsin DNR's interest in promoting trapping is to protect a special interest recreational activity and to pander to the interests of farmers (see the DNR website, stating that trapping is "necessary in modern-day, furbearer management and critical in the reduction of wildlife damage to crops and property and can help to reduce or relocate nuisance animals.")
The Animal Protection Institute sums the necessity of trapping up well: "Wildlife managed itself for literally billions of years before there were state and federal government agencies—not to mention hunting, trapping, and fishing industries—finding a 'need' to use trapping as a 'wildlife management tool.'"
The Steel-Jaw Leghold Trap
Unfortunately, Wisconsin allows the use of the steel-jaw leghold trap. Banned in over 80 countries and in 8 states, this trap is loathed by not only animal protection advocates but by the public at large. A 1978 national survey conducted for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service by Yale University showed that 78% of respondents opposed the use of steel-jawed leghold traps. Additionally, many veterinary associations, including the World Veterinary Association and the American Animal Hospital Association have policy statements opposing the use of leghold traps. In 1993, the Executive Board of the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) declared, "The AVMA considers the steel-jaw leghold trap to be inhumane."
How the traps work: (from the Animal Protection Institute's website)
An archaic device used for centuries, the steel-jaw leghold trap is the most commonly used trap in the U.S. by commercial and recreational fur trappers today. Triggered by a pan-tension device, the weight of an animal stepping between the jaws of the trap causes the jaws to slam shut on the victim's leg, or other body part, in a vice-like grip. Most animals react to the instant pain by frantically pulling against the trap in a desperate attempt to free themselves, enduring fractures, ripped tendons, edema, blood loss, amputations, tooth and mouth damage (from chewing and biting at the trap), and starvation. Some animals will even chew or twist their limbs off, so common that trappers have termed this occurrence as "wring-off," which for them means the loss of a marketable pelt. To the animal left crippled on three legs, "wring-off" means certain death from starvation, gangrene, or attack from other predators.
On land, leghold traps are most frequently set for coyote, bobcat, fox, raccoon, skunk and other furbearing animals. However, leghold traps are inherently indiscriminate and will trap any unsuspecting animal that steps foot into the trap jaws, including companion animals, threatened and endangered species, and even humans. Trappers admit that for every "target" animal trapped, at least two other "non-target" animals, including dogs and cats, are trapped.
Aquatic leghold traps are most often set for muskrat, otter, mink, and beaver. Most animals trapped in water will either try to surface to gasp for air or will drag the trap under water in an attempt to reach land. Usually they die a slow, agonizing death by drowning, which can take up to 20 minutes for some species. Death by drowning has been deemed inhumane by the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA).