15-05-2025
Florida wildlife agency considers bringing back barbaric steel traps
There are three three-legged bears in Seminole County, according to Bear Warriors United President Katrina Shaix. All three lost their legs to traps. (Photo via Shaix)
I'm probably in the minority here, but I love being asked to fill out surveys. When big corporations or ginormous government agencies want my opinion, I'm happy to give it to them. Y'all want to hear from little ol' me? How flattering!
I got a request just the other day from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to offer my thoughts on revising their rules about using steel traps to catch wild animals.
'The FWC is seeking feedback from the public on proposed changes to wildlife trapping regulations in Florida,' said the agency's email, dated May 9.
Well, gosh, I was happy to oblige them! I am generally in favor of steel traps when it comes to minds. As for actual steel traps? Put me down as a NO.
For the past 53 years, steel-jaw foothold and leg traps and body-gripping traps to capture wild animals have been banned for use in Florida unless you were one of the few people who qualified for a special use permit.
But now the wildlife commission is considering changes to its trapping rules.
A spokesperson for the agency, Ryan Sheets, said this effort to 'modernize' the rules does say that 'requirements currently associated with the Special Use Permit process be incorporated into rule.' However, Sheets told me, 'nearly everyone would be required to obtain a permit prior to trapping wildlife in Florida.'
The problem is that the permittees would no longer be the small, select professional group that now qualify. Instead, the general public could get one.
'The key component to the rule changes to steel-jaw foothold traps and steel-jaw body-gripping traps is that they will remove the existing 'Special Use Permit' requirement to use these traps … which, for all intents and purposes, effectively reverses the state's ban on steel-jaw traps,' Robert Ruderman of Humane Wildlife Consulting of South Florida said.
The wildlife commission's talk about 'modernizing' the trapping rules is 'just a shameless attempt to gaslight the public,' Ruderman told me this week.
I guess you could say that the wildlife commissioners feel trapped — or at least tightly confined — by the existing rules. Now, like any trapped animal, they want to loosen things up.
This loosening of the regulations hasn't gotten a lot of attention yet, because everyone's so upset about the FWC's misguided and unscientific push for another bear hunt. But advocates of humane treatment of animals are paying close attention, indeed.
'We're glad they're considering an update to the trapping rules,' said Kate McFall, Florida director of the Humane Society of the United States. But her organization is opposed to any attempt to make it easier for people to use steel foot and leg traps, which she called 'barbaric.'
'We do not want to put these antiquated traps in the hands of the general public,' she told me.
In case you're wondering (I sure was!), the use of these traps date to the days when men wore hats made of animal fur instead of ballcaps touting overpriced sports teams or brainless political slogans. Trapping was the preferred way to catch beavers, wolves, and other wildlife used by hatters, mad or otherwise.
A lot of folks these days sneer at fashion news: 'Who cares who wore what at the Met Gala!' But the economics of fur fashion drove a lot of the early American (and Canadian) exploration and economy.
Some of the earliest steel traps were made by a guy named Sewell Newhouse, who lived in the upstate New York town of Oneida. Newhouse's father was a blacksmith, so at age 17 he made his first steel trap using his dad's scrap metal.
In 1849, Newhouse the trap maker joined a religious commune in Oneida run by an unusual fellow by the name of John Humphrey Noyes. The fur trade was in full swing then, and a history of Newhouse traps says that by 1855, 'the demand for Newhouse steel traps had grown to such an extent that the Oneida Community leaders decided to begin manufacturing on a much larger scale, and it became a major part of the business dealings of the community.'
The main thing the Oneida community is remembered for these days is not its trap factory but what happened when they got behind closed doors. Noyes believed he was God's prophet on Earth, and his version of the gospel called for the commune members to all have sex with multiple partners. In fact, Noyes has been credited with coining the term 'free love.'
'They were swingers basically before swinging was ever invented,' explained the author of a recent book on the Oneida community. Isn't history fun?
It's impossible to miss the irony of the commune-ist Newhouse's life. Here was a man who made a living making traps for animals, but he didn't want to be trapped into a conventional marriage. He was in favor of free love and captured wildlife.
Eventually the commune got out of the steel trap business. Instead, they became known for making a different metal product: forks, knives, and spoons. Their popular Oneida Flatware is still a big deal today. I guess you could say they stuck a fork in their trapping business.
Outside of Davy Crockett cosplay, nobody's wearing fur hats anymore. Instead, the steel traps are now mostly used to protect commercially valuable animals from predators or to catch unwanted intruders.
There are about 200 licensed professional trappers in Florida, according to the Florida Trappers Association. One of the most active is Mark Neely, a Navy retiree who's been in the trapping field since 2005. He specializes in catching coyotes on cattle ranches because 'there's nothing like trying to outsmart a coyote.'
Neely sat on the technical advisory group that the wildlife commission formed to consider how to change its rules. He attended every meeting but told me he didn't understand where the staff was coming from on some of its proposals.
'Sometimes I wondered, 'Have any of these people set a trap before in their lives?'' he told me. 'Sometimes I wondered if this person knew what they were talking about.'
Neely was not a big fan of the animal welfare folks on the committee, either, whom he also did not consider well-informed.
'They talk with their hearts, God bless 'em,' he said.
Neely contended the wildlife commission would never get rid of the need for permits for using steel traps. Nevertheless, he said, he's inclined to favor the existing rules over any new ones.
'If I could do it over,' he said, 'I wouldn't make any changes.'
I don't know why Florida clamped down (so to speak) on the use of steel leg and foot traps in 1972.
This was the era when Congress passed our foundational environmental laws, like the Clean Water Act (1972) and the Endangered Species Act (1973), all of which resulted from the first Earth Day protest in 1970. Perhaps it was driven by that same circumstance.
I bet it had something to do with the traps' propensity for grabbing the wrong thing — dogs, cats, eagles, panthers, even children. Ten years ago, for instance, a 12-year-old boy in North Carolina got his hand caught in a trap and it took six emergency room doctors to get the thing off of him.
Even when a steel trap grabs hold of the right wild animal's leg, the animal may be so desperate to escape that it winds up ripping off that limb. Sometimes trappers put out so many traps that they can't come back to check on what they've caught until it's too late to stop that from happening.
'The length of the suffering is significant,' McFall told me.
The state's permitting system has limited the number who can use these instruments to about 100 people. But they are still in use and still taking a toll.
Katrina Shadix of Bear Warriors United told me that she's seen not one, not two but THREE three-legged bears in Seminole County, all of them nicknamed 'Tripod.'
How did they get that way? The answer, in the words of Admiral Ackbar from 'Return of the Jedi': 'It's a trap!'
The 1972 state law that bans steel leg and foot traps doesn't allow for any exceptions, Shadix told me. But the wildlife commission has allowed their use to continue as long as the trapper applies for a free permit first.
In other words, she said, the wildlife commission has been breaking the law.
That's why, in 2019, Shadix threatened to sue the FWC over its trapping rules. Shadix is not shy about taking state agencies to court. She recently won a big case in which she'd accused the state of breaking the Endangered Species Act by failing to protect manatees from a major die-off.
Shadix told me that her threatened lawsuit prompted the wildlife commission staff to promise that if she held off suing, they would update the rules to make sure they are more humane. The update has hobbled along about as fast as one of those three-legged bears.
In 2023, Shadix and more than two dozen other people concerned about the humane treatment of wildlife showed up at a commission meeting where the staff presented a report on how they were progressing.
'The objectives for updating the wildlife trapping rules include allowing for all current uses of traps without the need for a permit,' said a memo from one senior wildlife commission staffer.
Shadix and the other the people who showed up for the meeting urged the commissioners to keep the permitting requirement and start charging a fee for it, too. And they suggested anyone using a trap should get mandatory training and licensing as well.
'Let's definitely do require licensing and training,' said Katherine McGill, who runs 411 Wildlife Solutions in Brooksville, according to 'I do not understand why there would not be a fee with this permit, just like every hunter and angler and so forth pays.'
After listening to the parade of speakers, FWC Chairman Rodney Barreto said he was on their side.
'I think as we are modernizing our trapping policies and procedures, I think the public's correct,' Barreto said. 'We want to [have] best practices, we want to check all the boxes, we want to be humane.'
If the FWC now makes it easier, not harder, to use these cruel traps, perhaps that should count as another falsehood told by Barreto, who recently denied before a state Senate committee plans to build on submerged land in Palm Beach County even though the Palm Beach Post reported he'd tried to do exactly that.
'Everything they're proposing is making things worse, not better,' Shadix told me this week.
The good news here is that there's still time for the wildlife commission to reconsider.
Sheets, the FWC spokesman, told me the staff hopes to bring its recommendations to their bosses in August so they can vote on them. That's the same meeting where they're expected to vote on holding another bear hunt, too.
If the commissioners do vote to let anyone who wants to use a steel leg or foot trap, I have a suggestion. Perhaps everyone who finds this to be disturbing should run right out and obtain one of these traps.
Then, they should bring these traps to the very next FWC meeting. They should set them up all around the table where the commissioners are meeting.
These traps would be clearly marked and checked regularly, which is better than what the animals get these days.
Maybe if they experience what being snagged is like, then the commissioners will do a better job of figuring out what's humane and what's not. You don't have to have a mind like a steel trap to see that.
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