"Opinionatedly Yours"
#5: September 22, 1997
Leghold Traps and Rabies: A Myth Demolished
By Barry Kent MacKay

It was December 7, 1996. A teenage boy named Peter was distraught. He called local newspaper columnist Dick Singer, of the Scarborough Mirror. What so concerned Peter, and other residents of the area, was the cruel plight of a red fox. Singer later wrote,

The fox was caught in a leg hold trap. With each tug, the heartless steel dug deeper. The animal's gyrations made it impossible to help. The police and Humane Society were called.

Eventually, two officers arrived, but the fox ripped free and bolted. We investigated the compost bed where the animal had been. There, among the scattered leaves, we discovered two leg hold traps, an animal's carcass and fruit. Then Peter stepped on a trap. It clamped on his boot and he screamed in pain. The garage was open and we peered in, hoping to find the owner. Instead we entered a den of horrors. On a rail hung a dead fox. Three more and raccoon pelts, neatly pinned, ranged beside it. Skinned carcasses lay on the floor. Beside the door hung an array of traps, skinning knives and pelt frames. Under the dead fox there was a dried pool of blood. The officers took action. I walked away too angry and sick to function. How could this happen in this community, this city?

The matter is being investigated. This community stands united. This must not happen again.

There were no charges laid. Indeed, in terms of the carnage, there was nothing new that had happened. For as many years as I can remember a man almost invariably described as "an old trapper" has legally been trapping "nuisance wildlife" in the City of Scarborough. No charges could be laid because the trapper, licensed by the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, had the "right" to trap animals when asked to do so by anyone bothered by "nuisance" fur-bearing mammals. He takes pride in being Scarborough's "only licensed trapper". He thus practices an insidious form of what most of us would consider to be animal abuse of the kind normally hidden away in rural and wilderness areas, far from public scrutiny. But Scarborough is an urban area, and trapping there gets noticed. Complaints are heard from time to time about animals being trapped. But trapping is a provincial responsibility. Previous efforts to ban the use of the leghold trap in Scarborough had failed.

How do you get a local ban on leghold traps? There is no simple answer, although what follows should help provide some ideas, and an idea of what not to do.

But first, there is the question of whether or not one wants to ban leghold traps. To avoid going over all the reasons why these barbaric devices should be banned (at every level of government, although any legislation is more easy to have passed at municipal levels), let us assume that you, dear reader, are sufficiently well-informed about the nature of the traps and the suffering they impose, and sufficiently compassionate and humane, to want them banned.

I refer you to Opinionatedly Yours #1 and #2, for a simplified, working definition of "animal rights." This is important because, I believe, too much time is spent by well-intended people damaging our ability to achieve such rights. You cannot achieve rights without public support. You cannot gain public support by making the public think you are dangerous, deluded, or incapable of arguing your case. Of equal importance, you cannot gain the support of legislators unless you have defined your objective and mounted good arguments. That can mean being able to successfully refute the arguments of your opponent.

But in the end, all legislative decisions (not unlike virtually all decisions between two or more courses of action) are political.

Scarborough is one of five cities and one borough making up what is now known as Metropolitan Toronto. Next year those cities, including the City of Toronto, itself, will all be amalgamated into what is popularly being called a megacity. This is the not necessarily popular (depending upon whom you talk to) decision of the provincial government.

But for now, each of Toronto's cities (including the one borough) have a degree of autonomy, although at least some of it is contingent upon provincial approval. One must know what laws (we call them by-laws in Canada, ordinances in the United States) can be passed by municipalities on their own, and which ones essentially require the permission of the provincial (or state) government, either in the form of a new law, or as enabling legislation.

Let us take a brief pause to ponder what such dry, esoteric information could possibly have to do with animal rights. The answer, simply, is that if you wish to establish a right, you must be familiar with the means of doing so and with the ramifications of the social matrix in which the rights are to occur.

Scarborough is an urban area, and trapping there gets noticed. Complaints about animals being trapped come in from time to time. The city may not like it; most citizens may not like it, and trapping may not reflect urban values or accommodate urban sensibilities, but trapping is a provincial responsibility. Previous efforts to ban the use of the leghold trap in Scarborough failed.

But this time the cries of pain of a trapped animal were heard by many, and reverberated through the public conscience. And the whimpering cries and struggles of that red fox are even now leading to a process that can produce a "right" for this not to happen again.

Enough people saw the fox's agonies, or heard the fox's screams of pain, or were told about what happened by trusted friends and neighbors, that there was an outcry. What "right" had the trapper to cause such suffering?

There are ways in which some rights for animals, however limited their nature, can be established. This is part of an incremental process similar to the incremental processes that establish rights for humans. However, as I have argued previously, establishment of rights for humans or animals is far shy of what I and many others would consider to be essential if we are to consider ourselves to be truly civilized and just. That is a goal we work toward on behalf of both humans and animals, each in our own way.

Serendipity also plays a role in many victories achieved for animals. It is often a matter of the right person or people being in the right place at the right time.

And so, in Scarborough, last December 7, a red fox was trapped where the public could see. The animal's agonies were observed. A journalist was involved. A boy was hurt. People were angry. The stage was set. All previous work by animal protectionists to educate the public as to the cruel nature of leghold traps certainly helped, but here was an example of exactly what that meant. Here was opportunity.

And here, too, were other values brought into play. People who might accept trapping in the north woods did not accept it where they lived. People who might be able to accept the cries of an animal unheard and unseen could not stand it when they, themselves, saw and heard the agony and the suffering. People who might care little enough about the welfare of a wild animal certainly worried about the welfare of their companion animals, or their children. Peter's own injury was not in vain, even if he stepped in the trap deliberately, not fully realizing just what would happen. What chance would a much younger child have of avoiding much greater pain and serious injury, if curious fingers probed such a device?

Enter Dan Newman, Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for Scarborough Centre, where the fox was trapped. An MPP represents his or her constituency, called a riding, to the provincial parliament. The system is different in each country, but compared to the U.S., an MPP is roughly equivalent to a State Senator. As trapping is provincially licensed, this was a provincial matter.

Newman is a member of the Progressive Conservative (PC) party, a right-wing party currently in power in Ontario. The PCs are passing large volumes of legislation that many of us fear are eroding social customs and services we consider to be our "rights." However, while they are currently down in the polls, the PCs were elected with a solid majority (although in our multi-party system they got just under half the popular vote.) Notwithstanding a few court challenges to some of their proposed legislation, they have the "right" to do what they are doing.

However, as they are conservative, their actions are not likely to focus on animal rights. On the contrary, they have pretty well sold out much of their wildlife management and environmental mandate to destructive forces. And very seldom can they be seen to be challenging economic interests in favor of social values. Therefore, Newman might seem an odd choice to come to the defense of animal protection interests. He did so through production of something called a private member's bill. This is a proposed new law that is presented independently of party affiliation or policy. Such bills rarely pass, and Newman's may not, but on the other hand his status as a member of the ruling party puts him in a good position to win.

The first hurdle was to move the bill past the Standing Committee on Regulations & Private Bills. If it becomes law, Private Member's Bill Pr78, as it is called, will allow the city of Scarborough to choose for itself whether or not it wants to ban leghold traps. In his own presentation to the Committee, Newman said, "When I was elected in June of 1995, as the Member for the riding of Scarborough Centre, I never would have imagined that perhaps the most pressing issue I would face would be the issue of leg hold traps within my riding."

He also said, "My office received more calls and more letters on this issue on Bill 26, Bill 103, Bill 104, Bill 136 or anything that our government has done."

To many residents of Ontario that list of numbered proposed legislation represents some of the most divisive and controversial legislative change ever experienced in our province. And yet the single issue of trapping had eclipsed all else, in Scarborough, an area full of raccoons, foxes, coyotes, squirrels, and other urban wildlife; domestic companion animals; and small children.

This brings us into "values," community traditions and standards. Newman was careful not to oppose trapping, per se, and to make it clear to the Committee that Private Bill Pr78 would have no impact beyond the boundaries of Scarborough. He pointed out that what was being asked for was no different than what was already in place in the City of Toronto, where leghold traps have been banned for many years.

There is an urgency to having this legislation quickly passed, ironically because of Newman's party's own suite of bills that will transfer Scarborough and the other cities, plus the borough of East York, into one, large city to be called Toronto. This move, which many of us regret, toward unification of laws and services to the Greater Toronto Area raises many questions as to which law would apply to the city. For example, would the leghold trap be banned throughout the megacity, as it is now banned in the current City of Toronto, or would the standard of Scarborough or North York, where leghold traps are legal, prevail?

It seems that it will depend on who does what. If a significant number of the municipalities involved enter amalgamation with, for example, a ban on leghold traps, that would probably be the law as it will pertain to the entire megacity. Legislation that was pending, or simply going through the stages of becoming law, would not count. So if there is to be a ban in what is now Scarborough, and it is to survive amalgamation, it must be in place before amalgamation occurs, sometime next year.

Now, if your memory cells are reasonably functional, you will recall that the title of this edition of Opinionatedly Yours is "Leghold Traps and Rabies: A Myth Demolished."

We've discussed leghold traps, but what has rabies got to do with anything? To answer obliquely, I would say it has to do with the most important part of gaining support: common ground.

Common ground is the place where values overlap. If enough people share a value, a desire, a need or an intention, it has an increasing chance to happen. I know that there are animal activists who don't want to hear it, but the fact is that without common ground, without public support, the rights we seek for animals, or for people, don't happen.

Case in point: we want a ban on leghold traps not just in Scarborough, but everywhere. And not only leghold traps, but snares, body-gripping traps, fur farms, and all other sources of cruelty serving the luxury fur industry. And not just for fur-bearing animals, but an end to all legalized abuse of all animals. Of course, if we consider anything less than achievement of all that to be a compromise, a failure, or nothing more than welfare that entrenches the status quo, then we have failed and always will fail. It seems to be the intent of a small and arrogant component of the animal-rights movement to consider nothing less than the total victory that is never achieved to be a "compromise" that weakens their objective. They are dogmatists who take pride in their superiority, unmoved by the damage their militancy can cause when it is not well-thought out and not directed toward gaining public support.

Remember what Newman said, that he had received more calls about trapping than about any other issue. These were calls from the general public, those same folks whose buying habits is the fuel that drives the engine of so much animal destruction to provide food, clothing, pets, entertainment, medical advances, and space, as we take over their very homes for our own use.

The common ground that they share overlaps our own ... they are not overtly, consciously cruel or indifferent. They simply do not want or need what they were forced to see in their midst when that poor fox was trapped.

And so the Committee convened and the sides were drawn, and the trapping apologists, recognizing the value of common ground, chose rabies. Ontario used to be the rabies capital of North America, from soon after the early 1950s, when this fatal disease made its appearance in the province. The only reason why human deaths from rabies were so rare over the following decades is that a campaign of constant publicity with lurid descriptions kept folks informed and worried. People know rabies is fatal, and that it causes a horrible death.

So the president of the Ontario Fur Manager's Federation, Murry Monk, wrote to the Committee, "The City of Scarborough was once known as the rabies capital of the world. Passing of a By-Law, as proposed, would certainly give that City back its reputation. The implications of the spread of rabies and the personal health issues associated with this By-Law could be catastrophic to the residents and visitors to the municipality."

Ainslie Willock phoned to ask if I would appear before the committee and, as a naturalist with a long history of interest in rabies, address this specific issue? I could not do so, due to prior commitments, but I had a better idea.

And so Ainslie called Rick Rosatte, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Rabies Research Unit, at Trent University, in Peterborough.

I will back up a little here to point out that Ontario's past rabies problems led to increased effort to find a way of blocking the spread of the disease. Ironically, the more successful the program, the less government interest in finding the funds to run it. Politicians respond to constituents' complaints; remove the complaints and the politicians quickly lose interest. We have steadfastly supported the Rabies Unit, whose work, overall, has saved thousands of animals from rabies, and thousands more from the punitive anti-rabies hunting and trapping campaigns of the past. So while the animal rights dogmatists might recoil at being involved with research scientists, for those of us seeking actual rights, pragmatism works.

In a letter to Ainslie dated August 28, 1997, Rosatte wrote, in part,

As you are aware, rabies has been endemic or well established in Ontario since the early 1950s. Since that time we have had more than 56,000 cases of animal rabies in the province. On the average there were 1,500 cases each year, with foxes and skunks accounting for about 65% of those. You are also probably aware that thousands of foxes and skunks have been harvested [trapped] in Ontario since rabies first entered Ontario in the 1950s. The bottom line is that we cannot find any significant relationship between the fur harvest and the number of rabies cases. That is, there is no evidence that fur-trapping in Ontario has played any role in controlling rabies (for further information on this subject see the publication "Fox rabies and trapping: a study of disease and fur harvest interaction" by D.L. Voight and R.L. Tinline, 1992, in G.C. Sanderson, ed., Midwest Furbearer Manage. Proceedings. Midwest Fish and Wildlife Conference, Wichita, Kansas).

Since the early 1960s, Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources biologists have felt that immunizing foxes against rabies was the most feasible tactic to control rabies in Ontario. That is, it may be wiser to immunize a wildlife population against a disease rather than removing animals (through trapping) from the population to control the disease. it took nearly 20 years of research for the MNR rabies team (along with many partners including researchers from Connaught Laboratories and Queen's University) to develop an effective method to orally vaccinate foxes against rabies. Mass aerial distribution of baits containing oral rabies vaccine began in 1989 and has continued to the present. In fact nearly 8 million vaccine-baits were air-dropped in Ontario between 1989-1996. As a result there has been a dramatic decrease in the prevalence of rabies in Ontario. While the number of rabies cases in the province during the 1980s (prior to vaccination) averaged 2,050/yr, there were only 256 cases in 1996 and just 16 cases during the first quarter of 1997. This is clear evidence that MNR's strategy of orally vaccinating foxes has had significant impact on the prevalence of rabies in Ontario.

In cities such as Scarborough and Toronto, MNR's approach to the management of the fox strain of rabies has been the same as in the rural communities. That is, we feel that vaccinating a rabies vector such as a fox or a skunk is a much more effective means of controlling the disease than by removing animals from the population. As a result, staff from the MNR Rabies Research Unit have hand-placed more than 300,000 rabies vaccine baits in the greenbelt areas of Greater Metropolitan Toronto (from Oshawa to Hamilton) since 1989. Due to this strategy, the number of rabies cases (not including bats as they have a different strain of rabies virus) in metro has declined to nearly zero.

MNR has succeeded in controlling the fox strain of rabies in Ontario. However, if a small outbreak does occur, our response is to distribute rabies vaccine-baits in the vicinity of the outbreak to contain and eradicate it. In fact, staff from the MNR Rabies Research Unit just finished placing several thousand baits in Scarborough in response to a single case of rabies in a skunk this summer. The outbreak appears to be contained. The bottom line is that MNR scientists believe that the best strategy to manage fox rabies in Ontario is through oral vaccination with vaccine baits and not through removing animals from the population by trapping. [Emphasis his.]

Rosatte went on to say that trappers provided materials from foxes they killed that, in the days of establishing an effective means of delivering the baits to the foxes, allowed the MNR Rabies Unit to judge their successes. This would indicate to me that Murry Monk would have been well aware that trapping did not have anything to do with rabies control. Either he did know, and chose to misdirect the committee, or he honestly did not know, and was thus surprisingly ill-informed about an endeavor he so strongly supports. Perhaps there is a third possibility, that he knows, but somehow can't bring himself to admit, that one of the primary justifications given in defense of trapping ... that it controls rabies ... is a myth.

At any rate the important thing is that we knew that the argument, seeking "common ground" in the fact that none of us wants to see a rabies epidemic in Scarborough, or anywhere else, was specious. And a simple phone call solicited the information we needed to blow that argument out of the water.

The fur industry had other arguments that did not bear up under scrutiny. For instance, they felt that a private property owner ought to have discretion as to what he did on his own property...he ought to have the "right" to contract a private trapper. But it took no real effort to point out that young children and companion animals have no real concept of private property. Perhaps they ought not to go to certain places, but in their innocence and curiosity, they do so anyway. Their "rights" not to be put at risk took precedence over the "right" of a property owner to use such a dangerous device.

Monk also argued that a ban on leghold traps would lead to an increase in human-animal conflicts in Scarborough, with subsequent increases in costs funded by taxpayers. Obviously this argument, too, seeks common ground with those of us who don't want to see an increase in such conflicts, who don't want to see increased tax-funded expenses. But both the City of Scarborough and the more densely urbanized City of Toronto have moved away from trapping (using live-traps, also known as box traps) toward an urban wildlife management strategy based on prevention, education, tolerance, and even enjoyment of wildlife within the urban scene.

As James H. Bandow, General Manager, Animal Control Services, City of Toronto, Public Health, Animal Control Services, wrote to the Committee last August 28,

The City of Toronto passed legislation on September 11, 1978, that prohibits the use of leg-hold traps within the City's boundary under the authority of section 4 of the City of Toronto Act, 1978, S.O. 1978, c 148 as amended.

Since the legislation was enacted 19 years ago, the City of Toronto has not experienced any negative impact on public health as a result of the ban. In 1989, the City adopted a new wildlife policy that promotes public recognition that wildlife forms an integral part of the urban habitat, and that City residents can best minimize conflicts with wild animals by reducing or eliminating food and shelter opportunities for wild animals on their properties. This policy has resulted in a dramatic reduction in the number of raccoons, skunks and foxes ... that need to be removed from private residences.

There has been no activity in the City that could have been more effectively done with leg-hold traps.

When the dust has settled the vote of the Committee was unanimous. Private Bill Pr78, An Act Respecting the City of Scarborough, 1997 (Leg Hold Trap Ban), will now be presented to Provincial Parliament. We will be there to counter the rabies myth, or any other lies put in defense of the status quo, using facts, figures, logic and compassion as the best tools available in the ongoing effort to make the world kinder to animals and people, alike.