Trapping everything would be bad business. You would not catch squirrels in a trap any more than you would shoot bluebirds or brown thrashers. One could easily damage his neighbourhood and himself by trapping the wrong things or trapping in the wrong way. A trapper who is a sportsman will see to it that his traps are of the right kind. I would not have a mouse-trap in the house that made a practice of catching mice by the foot or tail. There are traps of many kinds for a variety of purposes and the trapper must either catch his prey alive and provide a way of despatching it humanely or use a trap which is instantaneous in its deadly work.
Box-trap and figure 4
Boys who have learned to trap in the natural, legitimate way do not become "fish butchers" or "game hogs" when they grow up. I once saw a picture of a game warden standing triumphantly beside a mound of dead crows, two thousand and twelve was the number, I believe. He had cunningly learned to imitate their call so successfully that they could not resist coming within range of his deadly weapon. Crows may be harmful to wild fowl but no boy with right instincts would be guilty of an act so base as this, so unbecoming a sportsman and a gentleman.
Getting rid of the animals which prey upon orchard, garden, and chicken roost is, without question, one of the ways of making the country a better place to live in. Trapping may be regarded as clean sport when done for this purpose, or for food when needed. Catching animals alive for the sake of taming and training them as pets is treated in another chapter and has its own rules.
There are a number of fur-bearing animals which, though too shy to venture inside the barn yard, prey so successfully upon the less fortunate ones, that it has become our duty to take up warfare against them. This duty is all the more heavily laid upon us because, in the act of civilizing the woods and converting the hills and valleys into cultivated fields and pastures, we have destroyed the natural hiding places of the wild things and "upset the balance." If we were suddenly to abandon this country, it would not be many generations before the buffalo, the wild pigeon, and the wild turkey would return to their haunts, the forests would recover the hills, the potato beetle would go back to its Colorado weed, and some natural enemy would control the San José scale and the English sparrow and reduce them to their natural places.
In some localities trapping of fur-bearing animals is still a money-making small industry and if properly carried on will lead to no evil results. The more a boy knows about the habits of the animals he seeks to outwit, the greater will be his chances of a capture, and when he knows a little he will want to know more. He will learn that there are rules in this game as well as in games with his human fellows, and that there are things "that no man would do," and pretend to self-respect. A knowledge of woodcraft is indispensable to the trapper and helps him to take care of himself and act with good judgment in cases of emergency.
A boy that sets a trap takes a certain responsibility. If he fails to visit his traps he breaks a rule of the game. A live animal in a cage trap begins to suffer very soon for water and for food. An animal in a steel trap, if not dead, will often pull or even gnaw off his injured leg, and escape. His tragic story may often be read in his footprints in the snow. If trapping for skins you must take them off while fresh, as they taint very quickly and may be ruined by delay.
TRAPPING MINK
The boy that catches a mink is a pretty lucky boy in these days when those wily little robbers have grown so scarce. The price of mink fur made into muffs and collars is so high as to make a mink skin worth trying for. I can imagine the surprise and well-earned triumph of my young trapping friend when, after trying for a year or two to solve the mystery of the disappearance of his thoroughbred chickens, he finally succeeded in capturing a fine mink. A friend of his to whom he had taught all he could of the art of trapping caught another. And this happened within the city limits of the nation's capital! Who says now that the mink has disappeared?