For four days last week, this town was a raccoon`s worst nightmare. It was no place for a fox, muskrat, coyote, beaver, mink, mouse or crocodile to be risking its hide, either.
Traps and snares designed to break a neck and snag a leg were on display by the thousands. Hunting rifles, skinning knives and other honed tools designed to separate critter from fur were on exhibit throughout the city`s air-cooled Civic Center and spilled onto surrounding parking lots in the heavy-flannel air of the not-so-great outdoors.
There were earnest seminars for as many as 400 intent trappers in training, a good many of them decked out in camouflage by K mart, seated in an amphitheater around an indoor ”wallow hole” re-created on the center`s concrete floor.
Lecturers in bib overalls and black hip boots provided instruction on how best to conceal leg traps in river clay and tutored their listeners in the ancient arts of Speed Muskrat Skinning and Mink-Snaring.
And, perhaps worst of all to any predator with an ear for trouble, there was an unheavenly choir of lip-squeakers. Both live and on Memorex.
”A `coon will run right up the leg of a good lip-squeaker. They think it`s a mouse caught by a snake, and they come up hoping to steal it,”
explained Gerald Stewart of Waco, Tex., purveyor of lip-squeaks, buck grunts and other recorded animal calls, including the distress cries of half-grown snowshoe hares, javelina pigs and coon babies.
When asked how the distress cries of wild animals are recorded, the previously loquacious Stewart went mum. His eyes narrowed.
”To tell you the truth, I`m wary of you,” said Stewart, who stood about 6 feet 3 inches tall and sported forearms that definitely did not type for a living.
Stewart thought he smelled a dreaded ”Anti,” he confided. Worse yet, an ”Anti” with a press pass.
”You got a card? I might come and look you up after you write a biased article,” he advised menacingly.
Four-legged fur-bearers were not the only prey with cause for paranoia at the National Trappers Association annual convention last week in Peoria.
It was the trappers themselves, about 5,500 of them, who felt most hunted. They kept an eye and ear and nostril out at all times for any scent of the dreaded, the righteous, the picket-sign waving, sloganeering, wild hog-hugging, chicken-loving ”Anti`s” of the international animal-rights
”industry,” as they described them.
”Anti`s” is a term used by trappers to describe a myriad of several hundred animal-rights, wildlife-preservation and anticruelty groups that range greatly in their methods and their goals.
The more extremist groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front, have been known to use vandalism and even violence as tools to draw public attention to mistreatment of animals, particularly in product-testing and scientific research. Laboratories have been raided and animals stolen, according to news accounts provided by the trappers. Most groups, such as the Elsa Wild Animal Appeal, which organized most of the Peoria demonstration at the trappers`
convention, are more moderate, though the trappers don`t always see it that way.
”You talk Anti`s, you`re talking one group of people trying to take something away from another group of people-something that has been around since the beginning of history,” said Stewart, an outwardly gentle man who lathers up at the slightest insinuation that an animal might have suffered for the sake of his trade.
Stewart`s admitted paranoia of Anti`s and the nontrapping press was shared, in general, by the leadership of the freewheeling 20,000-member association. Before the convention, workshops were held to drill members on avoiding confrontations with animal-rights extremists, who have been known to provoke fights, throw blood and steal and damage the property of hunters and trappers, convention-goers said.
Reporters, most of whom allegedly cannot afford mink coats and therefore have little sympathy with fur-trappers, were allowed entrance to the convention floor but treated like traps waiting to be sprung.
To handle the anticipated heat from animal-rights people and questions from the press for the convention, the trappers brought in a hired-gun media man from Washington, Tom Riley, whose specialty is ”Crises Public
Relations,” according to his card.
”We were told that there could be some baiting of trappers here,” Riley said.
”We`ve done as much as we can to tell the trappers to be careful. These are very common people, rural people who haven`t been faced with the Anti`s.” Riley and association members at the convention portrayed trappers and their association as a folksy batch of conservation-minded ”animal management” hobbyists, rural sportsmen and meat-on-the-table providers who are misunderstood and maligned by a highly sophisticated, suspiciously financed and outright silly animal-rights conspiracy.
The typical trapper`s description of an encounter with a ”blood-sucking Anti” ends with ”. . . and then I looked down and saw she was wearing leather shoes and I said, `And where do you think leather comes from? And she didn`t know.` ”
”The humane society just declared bacon and eggs as the `Breakfast of Cruelty,` ” Riley scoffed.
Anti`s love laboratory rats and hate circuses, according to the trappers. Riley alleged that some animal-rights people pose as clowns, mingling with families and talking nasty to drive people away from the circus, which they claim mistreats animals.
Gearing for battle, Riley met with trappers in workshops on the first two days of the convention last Thursday and Friday. He prepared them for an expected animal-rights demonstration on Saturday.
It could get ugly, he told them.
”They have an inflated beaver they use, about 20 feet, head to tail,”
he warned.
But the animal replica of that particular species that attracted the most trapper attention was not presented by the animal-rights people. Instead, it was worn as a costume by a door hostess for the locally notorious Big Al`s strip joint. The hostess wearing the costume stood on Main Street, a few blocks from the convention center, baiting the trappers to come inside.
”It was just a novelty item, for effect,” said Big Al`s manager, Dennis Kupferschmid. ”We had a lot of them come in, usually in groups of five or six and dressed pretty casual, but it was one of the quietest weekends with the fewest police calls we`ve had in a while.”
About 200 animal-rights demonstrators did parade and picket around the convention on Saturday, but their display was limited mostly to black armbands inscribed with the words ”Ban Traps” and a few posters carrying messages to the muted tune of ”When you are caught in a trap, it`s a long, long, long hot summer” and ”Behind every fur coat there is a dead animal.”
Several animal-rights groups participated under the common theme,
”National Day of Unity to Ban the Leghold Trap.” A few heated words were tossed back and forth between the trappers and the demonstrators.
A spokeswoman for Trans-species Limited, an animal-rights group, charged, ”Cowards trap. Strong men protect and defend the innocent,” while the worst retort one trapper could come up with was to assail the antitrapping demonstrators as ”unsuccessful yuppies.”
Trappers themselves have not been too successful in recent years. In good times, a full-time trapper with a lot of life in his legs can earn as much as $30,000 a year, but ranch-raised foxes have played havoc with the price of those wild pelts, and the market for furs in general is depressed due to changing styles. Even a good bobcat hide will barely bring $100 anymore.
But because most trappers are only part-time sportsmen, they have other diversions, one of which is collecting traps, any kind of traps: bear traps, varmint traps, even roach traps, ant traps and mousetraps. In fact, the majority of the exhibits at the convention were assorted and sordid traps displayed on tables inside or outdoors on car hoods, tailgates and parking lot asphalt.
Whispers on bated breath followed legendary trap collector Boyd Nedry, 63, of Comstock Park, Mich., at the convention. Nedry has assembled 300 traps in his 45 years of collecting. The retired construction worker is reported to have paid as much as $800 for a single mousetrap-his area of specialization.
Nedry was more than happy to discuss his hobby, but he denied the insinuation of extravagance on his part. ”Oh, I paid $90 for one, but that is the most I ever paid,” he said.
Trap collecting is not well understood, particularly, by women-although there were a few women trappers at the convention-but it does have its benefits, Nedry noted. ”We don`t have any mice.”
Another benefit of collecting mousetraps is that it doesn`t involve animal urines used by trappers of larger animals to hide the human scent around traps.
The urines of wild mink, coyotes, bobcats, fox and other assorted critter bladders were being peddled in glass containers, plastic jugs and even, surely to the horror of major bottlers everywhere, in containers from Coca-Cola Classic, Diet Pepsi and A&W Root Beer at the convention.
The Peoria Convention Center, which otherwise appeared to be a den of cleanliness, carried a reek that hung on long after the urine-sellers and lip- squeakers had packed off to the hinterlands on Sunday, according to Dennis Johnston, marketing and advertising director for the center.
Don`t be surprised if the Peoria City Council passes an emergency appropriation for several hundred gallons of V-8 this week.
”The smell is hanging around a little bit but not like it was for the four or five days when everyone had their bottles open,” Johnston said. ”We will be experimenting with various liquids to remove the odor, and I understand tomato juice works real good on skunk.”
