The New Hampshire Animal Rights League, NH Furbearer Protection Team and other animal advocates will hold an on-the-street demonstration against the wearing of fur and the trapping of animals for fur.

Demonstrators will remind city shoppers not to buy fur, even fur-trimmed items, because these purchases all spell a cruel death for animals. Foxes, minks, fishers, coyotes, raccoons and beavers all die unnecessarily for fur. Whether on a fur farm or trapped, the animal suffers all the same.

The demonstration will take place on Saturday, January 28, 2012, from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm with a snow date of Sunday January 29 or February 5th on the corner of Hazen Drive and Loudon Road in Concord. This location was selected due to its proximity to the New Hampshire Fish & Game Department, the agency that not only regulates, but promotes recreational fur trapping.

Demonstrators will target the NH Fish & Game Department for promoting trapping and allowing the use of cruel trapping methods, the same old inhumane methods used for centuries.

As NH trapper, David O’Hearn, wrote in Hawkeye, Hunting & Fishing News (Dec. 2011, Sec. 2, p. 36): “We are very fortunate in New Hampshire to be able to trap as our forefathers did.” He explains: “New Hampshire trappers have a huge support base,” including NH Fish and Game Department. “Through this network and support of agencies like the Farm Bureau, the Forest Society and town public works departments, trapping in New Hampshire has remained relatively unchanged.”

Because of Fish & Game, it is legal for trappers to use steel leg, foot and body gripping traps. These traps are placed in the woods and wetlands where unsuspecting wild and domestic animals get captured by them. Trappers regularly kill animals by bludgeoning and suffocating them.

Because traps can’t discriminate between a fisher and a bobcat, bobcats, a protected species, die in body-crushing traps set for fishers. Because traps can’t discriminate between a mink and a hawk, hawks die in leghold traps set for minks. Such incidental kills are merely “trash” for trappers.

Ironically, wild furbearers are being trapped and killed in NH and other states to satisfy the demand for fur in Asia. At a recent U.S. fur auction, representatives from China and other Asian countries bought out the vast supply of fur pelts, because the major market for US-produced pelts is there, not here in the U.S.

For all these reasons, demonstrators want fur trapping in N.H. to come to a halt.

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