The Wall Street Journal reported this week that a ban on fur traps approved by Washington state voters in 2000 has backfired on some residents by making it illegal to use common traps designed to kill moles.

The initiative, approved by 55 percent of voters, banned the use of \”body-gripping traps . . . [on] nonhuman vertebrates.\” The bill, which was engineered by the Humane Society of the United States, included exceptions for rats and mice, but not for moles. And Washington\’s Fish and Wildlife Department claims that the plain language of the bill makes it illegal to use traps to kill moles.

The Journal reports that a similar problem occurred in Massachusetts where the HSUS pushed a similar ban on traps. As a result the beaver population in Massachusetts almost tripled in the five years after voters approved the initiative in 1996. In 1999, the Massachusetts initiative was amended to allow for some trapping of beavers.

The Washington state legislature has attempted to amend its anti-trapping initiative but has been blocked by Republicans in the legislature who claim that amending the bill to exclude moles would create a double standard that, as the Wall Street Journal describes it, \”would allow wealthy suburbanites to trap moles but prevent ranchers from trapping coyotes preying on livestock.\”

Meanwhile, Washington residents are using a number of ingenious (and often questionable) methods to kill moles, including gasoline, explosives, and flooding mole tunnels with garden hoses.

Source:

After Washington Forbids Animal Traps, Mountains of Molehills Make It Reconsider. Robert Gavin, The Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2002.