By Jessica Johnson, APV Chief Legislative Officer
Friday, Jan. 27, 2017
Starting November 1 of last year—for the first time in nearly five decades—millions of acres of New Mexico’s private and state trust lands are now open to cougar trapping until March 31, 2017.
This means everyone is at greater risk of stepping into cougar traps and snares, including nursing mother cougars and their kittens who are supposed to be protected under state regulations, as well as federally protected endangered species like Mexican wolves. We need your help to stop this massacre.
What kind of barbaric devices will now litter our state in large numbers?
The traps contain a steel-loaded trigger that closes two steel jaws, which can spread up to approximately seven inches wide, around the leg of an animal that steps between the jaws.
Snares use a coiled spring with a looped metal cable that cinches tightly around an animal’s foot.
Captured animals often further injure themselves while thrashing or even chewing off their own trapped limb while trying to escape. Traps often go unchecked for long enough that the animal starves, dies of dehydration or exposure, or is killed by another animal before being found.
Traps and snares are cruel and completely indiscriminate. Why does that matter?
That matters when a healthy cougar population depends on mother cubs being able to raise their young into adulthood.
Orphaned cubs younger than six months have a 96% rate of death by starvation.
That matters when the survival of an entire species can be jeopardized by even just one animal dying from a trap injury. For example, there are only about 97 Mexican wolves left in the world, and many of them live in New Mexico.
That maters because New Mexico families and their dogs hike all over our beautiful lands, and can easily step into a trap, resulting in anguish, thousands of dollars in medical and/or veterinary bills, and sometimes maiming and even death of companion animals.
What can be done?
Animal Protection of New Mexico—our affiliated 501(c)(3) organization—has brought state and federal lawsuits against the New Mexico State Game Commission for its decision to expand cougar trapping, but the legal process can take months or years. And the cougar trapping carnage has already begun.
There’s another path to dramatically reducing the reckless cruelty of cougar trapping: Animal Protection Voters’ legislation to ban not only traps, but also lethal poisons, on public lands.
The ongoing cruelty, ecological destruction, risk to public safety, and waste inflicted by steel and other kill traps, snares, and poisons can no longer be justified in New Mexico. Because of their non-selectivity, both targeted and non-targeted animals–including family cats and dogs, threatened and endangered species–fall victim to traps and poisons, leading to excruciating suffering and deaths. That’s why more than a dozen local New Mexico governments have passed resolutions in support of banning traps locally and statewide.
Any day now, we will be pleased to see legislation introduced to restrict traps and poisons on public lands, and we hope you’ll join us in our effort to see it passed.
Please help us put an end to this inhumane, indiscriminate, destructive practices on New Mexico’s public lands. Sign our petition here.
Some content originally published in Making Tracks, Winter 2016. Read the entire issue here.
