Do they really have UNLIMITED trapping? That seems hard to believe for any jurisdiction today. Of course limits are required. I would be very surprised if they are not in place. At the end of the day, with or without limits, if a given species is trapped and is still extant in trappable numbers decade after decade, "conservation" is by definition working to some extent, whether by design or not.
Thanks for reading. There are no bag or possession limits on furbearers in Colorado under current regulations, which you can find on the CPW website, though there are season limitations and means restrictions (no snares, no footholds, etc.). The lack of bag limits is not particularly unusual in states with permissive trapping regulations, but critics view this approach as indiscriminate and often oppose suppressing populations of historically trapped species more generally. Hope that's helpful!
I would postulate here (i was a fur-trapper in my youth and young adulthood) that the banning of snares and footholds represents a very effective bag-limit. Anyone who has actually spent any time in pursuit of furbearers in a consumptive way, can tell you that without snares or foothold traps… there’s hunting, that’s it, and even at its best, hunting is a much less efficient way of taking furbearers than trapping. With the success of your conservation model in the populations themselves. Do they seem stable or no? Of course the activitists in many cases would prefer a strict hands-off policy, but that too comes with conservation caveats, in some places and conditions deadly for animals they were hoping to conserve, though i don’t think this would be the case in Colorado.
This seems to be the way it's playing out in Colorado. I haven't looked at the data, but I was told that coyotes in particular avoid box traps. Hunting is a pretty substantial part of the annual bobcat kill.
Most of the canids are very difficult to trap in the absence of footholds - properly prepared at that - or snares. As for cats, we have bobcat here (and lynx, both) i don't know anything about their resiliency. Seems to me cats are not as resilient as coyotes. I've always been a bit disturbed by the idea of the predator hunters going after them. Coyotes, not so much. I had a distant neighbor, he would snare on the order of a hundred on his farm per year. Every year you'd think, geez, he must be just hammering them, that ain't gonna last. Yet every year he'd get another hundred. It was like there was an artesian well out there spouting coyotes. They almost seem supernaturally resilient - and fecund. Good for them!
Thanks for reading. I agree that there is a pretty deep-seated hostility in the west towards wolves and coyotes, whom a lot of people view flatly as a nuisance. I do think, however, that attitudes towards big cats and furbearers are more mixed. People who hunt mountain lions with dogs are truly obsessed, highly skilled and have very close relationships with those animals. Trappers are similar. Neither group typically sees extermination as a goal — their lifestyle actually forces them into a conservation relationship with their target species. I think you're right that the question of whether to prioritize human use of animals rather than biodiversity for its own sake really divides people on these issues.
Do they really have UNLIMITED trapping? That seems hard to believe for any jurisdiction today. Of course limits are required. I would be very surprised if they are not in place. At the end of the day, with or without limits, if a given species is trapped and is still extant in trappable numbers decade after decade, "conservation" is by definition working to some extent, whether by design or not.
Thanks for reading. There are no bag or possession limits on furbearers in Colorado under current regulations, which you can find on the CPW website, though there are season limitations and means restrictions (no snares, no footholds, etc.). The lack of bag limits is not particularly unusual in states with permissive trapping regulations, but critics view this approach as indiscriminate and often oppose suppressing populations of historically trapped species more generally. Hope that's helpful!
I would postulate here (i was a fur-trapper in my youth and young adulthood) that the banning of snares and footholds represents a very effective bag-limit. Anyone who has actually spent any time in pursuit of furbearers in a consumptive way, can tell you that without snares or foothold traps… there’s hunting, that’s it, and even at its best, hunting is a much less efficient way of taking furbearers than trapping. With the success of your conservation model in the populations themselves. Do they seem stable or no? Of course the activitists in many cases would prefer a strict hands-off policy, but that too comes with conservation caveats, in some places and conditions deadly for animals they were hoping to conserve, though i don’t think this would be the case in Colorado.
This seems to be the way it's playing out in Colorado. I haven't looked at the data, but I was told that coyotes in particular avoid box traps. Hunting is a pretty substantial part of the annual bobcat kill.
Most of the canids are very difficult to trap in the absence of footholds - properly prepared at that - or snares. As for cats, we have bobcat here (and lynx, both) i don't know anything about their resiliency. Seems to me cats are not as resilient as coyotes. I've always been a bit disturbed by the idea of the predator hunters going after them. Coyotes, not so much. I had a distant neighbor, he would snare on the order of a hundred on his farm per year. Every year you'd think, geez, he must be just hammering them, that ain't gonna last. Yet every year he'd get another hundred. It was like there was an artesian well out there spouting coyotes. They almost seem supernaturally resilient - and fecund. Good for them!
Thanks for reading. I agree that there is a pretty deep-seated hostility in the west towards wolves and coyotes, whom a lot of people view flatly as a nuisance. I do think, however, that attitudes towards big cats and furbearers are more mixed. People who hunt mountain lions with dogs are truly obsessed, highly skilled and have very close relationships with those animals. Trappers are similar. Neither group typically sees extermination as a goal — their lifestyle actually forces them into a conservation relationship with their target species. I think you're right that the question of whether to prioritize human use of animals rather than biodiversity for its own sake really divides people on these issues.