A call to the phone number for Footloose Montana, the organization behind the initiative to ban trapping on Montana’s public lands, yields only an automated voice requesting you state your name for the party’s approval. Only if Footloose accepts your call will you be directed to organizer Chris Justice. The system was implemented after a series of anonymous death threats.
The phone security is one of the first hints of the intensity of the debate over the initiative, I-177. It’s also a fight that has been going on since a couple founded Footloose in 2007. The group has mounted two failed attempts to get I-177 on the ballot. This year, after nearly a decade, Justice and the group gathered enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Although a central argument against trapping is the negative effect on protected and endangered species, Footloose’s campaign has focused less on wild animals, and more on domesticated ones.
Just how big of a threat traps pose to pets is a point of contention between the two sides, but many proponents of the issue are people who have had their own pets injured in traps. Betsy Brandborg, who investigates complaints against lawyers for the Montana State Bar Association, is one of those advocates. Brandborg’s Airdale, Polly, had her trapped by leg-hold snares on three separate occasions near Helena. The first time was what sparked her interest in the issue.
The second was what solidified it.
That time she reported the incident hoping the state inspection would lead to some “common sense reform.” Instead, what she got was a call from Fish, Wildlife and Parks, requesting she pay a $300 ticket for springing two traps near the one that caught Polly.
For her, the push to ban trapping grew out of an unwillingness by the state to address the issue. After the ticket incident, she contacted FWP and offered to assemble a group of lawyers to reform trapping laws. She suggested trap-free zones, for example.
It was only after they dismissed her offer that she focused her efforts on I-177. Brandborg understands that trapping is a Montana tradition, pointing out her grandfather, father and brother trapped. However Brandborg makes a distinction between a Montana tradition and the type of trapping she sees in Helena.
“Make no mistake, this isn’t your grandfathers trapping. Your grandfather didn’t drive a four wheeler or $30,000 truck up the drainage and set dozens of traps in every direction,” Brandborg said.
Jason Maxwell, the vice president of the Montana Trappers Association, hates hearing stories like Polly’s. He has two dogs, a boxer and a wolfhound, and said trappers are not monsters. They’re not hoping to catch your pet, he contends and is quick to point that many times the traps that catch pets were illegally set in the first place.
For Maxwell, the solution is not a ban, but requiring trapper education classes. Idaho has adopted this rule, and it has led to significantly fewer accidental deaths and injuries, and as Maxwell hopes, fewer “misconceptions that give trappers such a bad reputation.”
But Maxwell and Toby Walrath, the president of the MTA, see I-177 as more than just a limit on trapping. Walrath sees it as an attack on Montanan’s access to their public lands. He argues the measure is the latest in a series of attacks by animal rights activists, adding that many other states that have faced similar measures and that restricting bear and mountain lion hunts followed.