Trapping in Massachusetts answer to our weekly E-Mails on the Outdoor Scene

Posted by Wayne G. Barber

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In November of 1996, Massachusetts voters approved a ballot initiative titled the “Wildlife Protection Act”. The initiative was launched by the Humane Society of the United States, along with a group calling themselves the ProPAW Coalition (Protect Pets and Wildlife), which spent considerable funding on TV ads depicting house cats in foothold traps and dogs missing legs. The slogan “Ban Cruel Traps” evidently resinated with 64% of the state’s citizenry - securing the initiative’s passage. Prior to 1996, MA Fish & Wildlife would contact licensed trappers to help remedy beaver conflict situations. The system worked well; as trappers would make a little money off pelts and beaver glands, the state would collect a little license revenue from trapping licenses, and residents would be relieved of beaver conflict (in the form of flooding to property, compromising septic systems and polluting wells, just to name a few).

In two and a half years following the ban, Massachusetts’ beaver population expanded from 18,000 to almost 55,000 according to reports from Audubon Magazine. Lawmakers scrambled to make amendments to the ban when impatient residents, who had become completely dependent on MA Fish & Wildlife to handle beaver complaints, began breaching beaver dams in the dead of winter (when beavers don’t repair them, and endangered reptiles and amphibians are vulnerable to fluctuating water levels). Whatever negative picture animal rights activists tried to paint of trappers before the ban, it paled in comparison to what unfolded in the state’s ponds, rivers and streams after the ban.

Years earlier in the late 1980s, a national animal rights group became successful getting trapping ban initiatives passed by town, county and state governments. Attempts were made by these groups to disguise regulated trapping as a public safety/animal welfare issue. Expectedly, an article to ban trapping was introduced at a Chelmsford, Massachusetts town meeting in 1988.

According to The Northeast Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies, “State wildlife experts reminded residents that regulated trapping was not a public safety issue, and warned that if regulated trapping were banned, there would be numerous undesirable consequences in the form of property damage and wildlife habitat degradation. Despite the warnings, the article was passed, and the trapping of furbearing mammals within the town was prohibited.

Prior to passage of the trapping ban, there were usually one to three complaints of beaver damage in the town each year. Following the ban, the beaver population, unchecked, began to grow rapidly, and the animals began to move into many previously unoccupied wetlands. Beaver dams began to flood houses and roadways. In 1992, state wildlife biologists working at the request of town officials investigated 25 beaver complaint sites. Two of these complaint sites were municipal wells which had been shut down (at a cost of $25,000) because of beaver flooding, and four other municipal wells were threatened. Individual landowners in town had incurred tens of thousands of dollars in damages to private wells, septic systems, lawns and roadways. The increasing beaver population and increasing property damage were directly related to the decision of the town's citizens to ban regulated trapping and allow uncontrolled beaver population growth to commence.”

The residents of Chelmsford were duped further by animal rights activists who had promised in 1988 and again in 1992 to install beaver “flow pipes”, as well as a proposal to "sterilize" beavers in the town (a technique that is not biologically feasible on a free-roaming rodent population). During the four years that the trapping ban was in place, activists never followed through on their promises and were never held accountable for the statements they had made.

At a special town meeting in September 1992, town citizens voted by a two-to-one margin to allow regulated public trapping to resume. During the regular trapping season later that fall and winter, four trappers working with homeowners and town officials removed 87 beaver. Source: Furbearers Conservation