Nearly a year after Washington state voters banned most forms of trapping, landowners, wildlife officials and trappers say they're dealing with the consequences. Dam-building beavers flood timber land. Coyotes snatch more lambs. River otters treat salmon hatcheries as all-you-can-eat buffets. Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is even posting signs that look like this(scroll up) in the woods to warn people of rabid raccoons.

Initiative 713 bans the use of body-gripping traps to capture any mammal for recreation or commerce in fur.

This petition requests that part of Initiative 713 be amended and that the Washington state government legalize trapping during the general trapping season with padded body gripping traps for the good of our state.

Many people in our fair state have the false impression that ALL body gripping traps are downright cruel. This isn’t always true, because when people think of body-gripping traps they think of steel traps with razor sharp teeth that break the leg of their victim. But padded traps are a painless, more effective and yet still a humane way of trapping. As seen in this video.

You may be thinking why not just use cage traps*? Good question, cage traps are not nearly as effective as padded foot traps, which is the reason that trappers haven’t been nearly as successful** after Initiative 713 was passed. This law has caused populations of certain animals to rise, creating an imbalance in the Eco-system. This has resulted in too many otters eating salmon, wolves snatching lambs, raccoons passing rabies to humans and other animals etc.

Padded traps also aren't bad for the environment because the population of fur bearing animals regularly goes up in the spring, because the carrying capacity*** for wildlife goes up, animals are born then in the winter when the carrying capacity goes down.  The surplus animals usually die of starvation, disease or predation. 

 In comparison padded foot-hold traps cause way less suffering to the animal that will likely die anyway.

The idea of padded traps being illegal is very illogical because it indirectly threatens human lives. Who could justify that?

*A cage trap is a device that the animal walks into to get some bait inside, and steps on a trigger which closes the door.
**Trapper success reports can be found here: http://wdfw.wa.gov/hunting/harvest/

***The carrying capaciy is the number of animal that one habitat can safely support.