Cub's death draws attention to cruelty of toothed traps

June 28, 2008

Article that was in the Argus, Thursday. For some reason I couldn't access it at the newspaper website, so excuse spelling mistakes, Im copying it from the newspaper.

A cape leopard cub that spent an agonising three and a half days with a mangled paw tightly jammed in the steel teeth of a gin trap on a Northern Cape farm, has been euthanised by conservationists after being released.

Members of the Cape Leopard Trust found that the injuries to its paw which had almost been severed and bones broken were too severe for the six month old animal to have survived in the wild.

The mother leopard had stayed with the cub while it was in the trap, so close that the conservationists at first thought two animals had been trapped.

Ironically, the mother and her two cubs had been snapped by a camera trap in the Namaqualand National Park just a few weeks ago. The last confirmed resident leopard in the area was in 1922.

Now the trust is hoping to use the young animals tragic death to galvanise national and provincial conservation authorities into urgently adopting legislation that will transform the use of gin traps for problem animal control and providing sufficient resources so that conservation extension officers can be appointed to regularly visit farmers and assist them.

Non lethal leg hold traps with the correct specifications, such as spring strength and gaps between the jaws are even used by some conservationists. For example, the first rare snow leopards in the Himalayas were trapped like this.

There are several other methods of protecting stock as well, like the Anatolian guard dogs and sheep collars with bells.

Andrew Baxter, the trusts chairman, says they want minimum standards for traps, including a register for the sale of all traps, and a requirement that any trap set in the veld must be visited at least of a daily basis to be able to release non predatory animals and allow the humane killing of target species.

They hope to arrange an urgent meeting with Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk, nature conservation officials and problem animal experts to get proper legislation in place urgently.

The trust which has been operating successfully in the Cedarburg area for the past five years, started a Namaqualand project in March, but farmers in the area are still habituated to simply killing problem animals.

An angry Quinton Martins (C.L.T) slammed the use of the toothed gin straps and the lack of monitoring by people who set them.

"Knowingly leaving animals to suffer for three days and longer is disgusting" he said.

Then there's a photo of him carrying the dead cub...Martins looks really crushed. He apparently walks for weeks on end through the mountains, looking after the Leopards, I suppose thats how he found this one.