As we learn more and more about animals – wild, domestic or human – being injured or killed by horrible traps, municipalities are being pressured to create bans on all traps.
Below is a notice sent by our friends at the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals to media and City Councillors in Toronto. Support this movement by sending a letter to the editor or contacting the Councillors.
TORONTO – The recent discovery of skinned beaver carcasses in the Don Valley has a national wildlife protection group calling for a ban on the use of body-gripping traps in the City of Toronto.
According to media reports, the carcasses were left to rot on the popular walking trail.
“This despicable behaviour must be stopped,” said Shannon Kornelsen, Director of Public Outreach for the Association for the Protection of Fur-Bearing Animals (APFA) in Ontario. “A complete ban on body-gripping traps in the City of Toronto and its surrounding areas is a strong, first step to ending this kind of suffering and to ensure the public’s safety.”
Other municipalities, including the City of Guelph, have instituted strong municipal trapping bylaws in recognition that provincial and existing municipal regulations have large loopholes; a fact well-known to trappers.
“Trapping is more than just an ethical issue,” Kornelsen said. “There is a very real potential for humans and their pets to be caught and injured – if not killed – in these devices.”
APFA is calling on the Toronto council to enact a ban on the use of all body-gripping traps in the City of Toronto. “For the sake of protecting wildlife and for the sake of public safety, we hope the City of Toronto will continue to live up to its status as a world-class city and ban the use of these archaic weapons,” Kornelsen said.
