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Traps that cause unnecessary suffering to some 22 million wild animals
killed for their fur each year may be declared ‘humane’ by the International
Standards Organization (ISO), say animal welfare experts in Britain.

‘This will enable fur traders to get round a recent European Community
regulation that would ban the import of wild-caught fur,’ says Bill Jordan,
a wildlife vet and director of the charity Care for the Wild, based in Sussex.
The regulation, which is due to take effect in January 1995, has a loophole:
furs will be allowed in if animals are trapped according to ‘internationally
agreed humane standards’.

The ISO trapping committee currently proposes to define ‘humane’ so
loosely that it would approve ‘restraint’ traps that break legs or dislocate
joints, and ‘submersion’ traps that take as long as 10 minutes to drown
a muskrat.

It is illegal to inflict such suffering on animals killed in Britain’s
abattoirs or lab-oratories. ‘The same standards should be upheld for wild
animals,’ says Caroline Manser, a vet and animal welfare researcher at the
University of Cambridge.

When the ISO secretariat, based in Geneva, set up a committee in 1987
to establish humane standards it was acting in response to an initiative
from Canadian fur trapping interests, says Neal Jotham of the Canadian Wildlife
Service, who is chairman of the committee. Trapping interests are still
heavily represented, says Jordan. He is one of the few national delegates
to the ISO with an animal welfare brief.

‘In the early stages, delegates said they couldn’t see the relevance
of discussing the welfare of animals that are caught in a trap and are going
to die anyway,’ says Don Broom, professor of animal welfare at the University
of Cambridge.

The ISO is proposing to approve:

Killing traps that take up to three minutes to render an animal unconscious.
In practice, these traps often fail to kill the animal unless it is just
the right size and weight, and enters the trap at the right angle. They
can inflict a lingering death on ‘trash’ species which trappers do not mean
to catch.

Restraining traps, often known as leg-hold traps, that cause injuries
adding up to 75 points on a modified version of the ‘Olsen injury scale’.
This would label as humane traps that cause major bruising, broken limbs,
dislocations, and severed toes, tendons and ligaments.

Submersion traps which drown their prey – a popular way to catch semiaquatic
animals such as muskrat, mink, beaver and otter. So well-adapted are these
animals to life underwater that they can take 10 minutes or more to die,
after prolonged, violent struggling. ‘This is absolutely unacceptable,’
says Manser. For any animal, ‘drowning is not a method of euthanasia accepted
by British, Canadian or American veterinary associations.’

Animal welfare campaigners argue that no leg-hold traps or submersion
traps should be judged humane. If trapping for fur has to continue, killing
traps that really do kill the right species instantaneously must be developed,
says Jordan. Traps that work reliably in this way do not exist at present,
and trappers argue that traps powerful and sophisticated enough to do this
are ‘impractical’, would cost more and would be more dangerous for the person
who uses them.

Jotham says a standard ‘so rigid that only one or two traps or trapping
types would meet it’ would be ‘of little practical value’. He suggests animal
campaigners may be trying to use the standard to lead to the virtual elimination
of trapping. At the same time, he stresses that the standard is voluntary,
and has no force in law. Manser says: ‘We are not talking about banning
these traps. We just believe they shouldn’t be allowed to call them humane.’

The ISO next meets in mid-April in Vancouver. The final vote is expected
at the end of this year or early next year, and Jordan is pessimistic about
the outcome. ‘Once the ISO sets standards, it will be very difficult for
welfare groups to convince Europe to reject them,’ he predicts.