My favorite set is in cane brakes and runways, using no bait. When I first began to trap, mink were not so scarce as they are now, but there are a few left yet. Not many years ago nearly every night I would have a muskrat's hide badly torn and sometimes the rat barbarously murdered and half eaten up.
One writer says, take bait and scent and set a trap properly, then go a little farther on and set a trap without either bait or scent, and see which trap you catch a fox in first.
Now we notice that this writer brings in the bait every time. We are very much in favor of bait, and make bait one of our most essential points in trapping the fox. This writer says that those "no scent" men are the ones that say fox are afraid of human scent. For our part we do not claim anything of the kind; on the contrary, we claim that it is the signs that we make that the fox is shy of.
I see there are a great many talking about mink not being afraid of railroad irons and barb wire fences writes a Louisiana trapper. Well, I guess they are not, but some of them are afraid of human scent under certain conditions, while under some other conditions they are not.
Find a place where they are liable to come, and tramp and tread around just like an unexperienced trapper would do, taking an old rusty or new trap, handling with naked hands and set either concealed or naked, stick a chunk of meat up over it on a stick, and then remove sticks and stones making a disturbance. This will make mink afraid of human scent in that place. A great many are afraid of a bait stuck up on a stick if there is human scent around it, so I think it is a combination of these; namely, disturbances, human scent and the unnatural place to find food that scares them away. Yet they are not all that way by any means.
Now let some of these fellows who think animals are not afraid of human scent try to catch an otter that has been caught before and got away, and they will think differently. I caught one last winter, that had his front leg off within an inch of the shoulder. I also caught a coon that had both front legs off high up, and strange to say this coon was fat and in good condition. He wasn't a very large one, and his teeth were badly worn off. He must have looked funny walking around on his hind feet like a bear, that is the way he walked for I could tell by the tracks.
I see a great deal of discussion about mink being afraid of human scent writes a prairie trapper. I think there is a difference between mink concerning this: some mink are afraid and others are not.
Last winter I caught a mink in a trap but he got away before I got there, and that mink after getting loose, followed the tracks I had made the morning before for about a quarter of a mile up the river before he turned in close to the bank. Now he didn't seem to be afraid of human scent.
Again I have walked up to a mink path, carefully set and covered my trap, and then carefully walked away in my old tracks, but never a mink would I get, nor would the mink even go along that path any more. I have even walked up to a path when I had no traps with me and then walked away, and altho the path had been used every day before, it was not used again for about nine or ten days.