Some of the most effective professional trappers in the world today approach trapping with the mindset of a child. That may sound like a bold statement, but let’s think about it for a minute. Having an open, creative mind, the ability to try new things, and willingness to solve interesting problems can all be considered youthful traits. The most enthusiastic I’ve ever been as a trapper was the first fall I ran a trapline. Every set was approached without any preconceived ideas or theories I’d learned about proper trapping technique – I simply tried anything I thought would work to catch the target animal. That may have resulted in some off-the-wall sets sometimes, but a lot of them worked.
Why do so many of us lose that youthful enthusiasm as we move along in our trapping careers? I think some of it has to do with society, culture, and how we’ve been taught to think. In his book “Stop Stealing Dreams”, thought leader Seth Godin describes how America’s modern education system has changed the way we think for the past century or so, and how that’s impacted us as individuals.
At the onset of the industrial revolution, most rural Americans lived on farms, but society needed factory workers to mass produce goods in cities. The modern education system in America was designed, for the most part, to train us to work in factories. We were taught to sit quietly, follow directions, and repeat what the teacher told us to. There was a right and a wrong answer, and disagreeing with the teacher (or in the future, the boss), meant you were wrong.
Education may have prepared us to be great, trainable workers, but in the trapping world, where independent thinking is a major key to success, I think it’s led many of us astray. When our entire mindset is built around learning a method, following instructions, and repeating the same tasks over without deviating, we become formula trappers.
What’s a formula trapper? I’m not sure there’s an easy definition, but I think we’ve all been guilty of formula trapping over the years. We set traps by the odometer. We only set marten and fisher traps in the thick cedar swamps. We make the same mink set under every bridge crossing. Our fox and coyote traps are seven and ten inches, respectively, back from the edge of the dirt hole. Basically, we do what we’ve learned or been told to do, and don’t think twice about it.
Now don’t get me wrong, formula trapping works. There’s a reason we do it. We have rules we know to be generally true, we stick to them, and they produce results. The problem is, although the formulas can produce average results, they never produce extraordinary ones. When we think based on the averages, we turn our brains off from the possibility of exceptional results.
The rules of nature, wildlife populations, and critter habits are more complex and dynamic than any factory could ever be, and that’s why the factory/formula mindset fails. Nature doesn’t always follow the same rules, and no one formula can predict what a particular species of furbearer will do, and how we as trappers can best catch them.
Being pretty well educated in the academic world, I’m probably one of the most guilty when it comes to formula trapping, though I’m working to unlearn many of the so-called ‘truths’ hard wired in my head on each trapping trip. The first big marten line I ran was right after watching a video about how effective rotten, stinky bait was for marten. It took a lot of set refusals to convince me that while that may have worked great in southeast Alaska, it wasn’t the ticket in northern Maine. I also set by the odometer, with a distance based on my perceived ideas of marten home ranges and my unwillingness to pass by large stretches of ground in between sets. That was another mistake. When I first started coyote trapping, the dirt hole set was the only one I knew, so I went around making baited dirt holes at every location. They caught coyotes, but also attracted black bears, which tripped traps and stole bait from up to two dozen sets each night. Flat sets would have caught coyotes and avoided the bears, but the dirt hole was my formula at the time, and I put my head down and remade sets for two weeks instead of using my head to find a creative solution.
Getting away from the formula mindset takes time, but it can be done. Over the years I started making marten sets in unlikely locations, and the catches were surprising. Last winter after numerous misses in shallow water snare pole sets for beaver, I set a few baited 330’s, which most folks, including myself, have shied away from in most cases. But they added several beavers to my catch. Though it was ingrained in my head to trap muskrats only in cattails, a switch in location on a neighbor’s farm pond resulted in dozens of muskrats more than 100 yards away from a cattail plant. It takes time, but I’m working to open my mind up to new ideas and less conventional trapping methods.
Most professional trappers share a common trait that we all can learn from. They never hesitate to try something different, whether it’s a new location, different bait or lure, or an off-the-wall set that just might work. That’s how they learn. Each new set is another at-bat. And when they connect, they learn something that formula trappers never do. They trap like a kid, challenge old ideas, solve interesting problems, and catch more fur.
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