The best hope for trapping is to get off the cold war with Russia and China. They still want our fur. Money. That is the incentive to trap.

I wasn't allowed by my dad to deer hunt until I was 12. Was a common practice of the time, given the maturity level of an 8 or 10 year old. However, my dad used those non deer hunting years to teach me safe gun handling, small game hunting, and general woodsman ship. For me, those years developed a love for the outdoors that will last a lifetime.

There is a lot to this. Up at the farm we had a situation where varmints.......mainly coon.......were causing a lot of trouble. Discovered there was a kid in the neighborhood who had developed an interest and a knack for trapping, so he was brought in. Sure enough, he did have a knack and caught a bunch of coons right off. They were even paying him $25 each, so there was incentive.

Short while after that I was talking to his grandfather and asked how the trapping was going and he told me that had cooled off. It wasn't the money......it was an ethics thing. Catching and killing coons....then dumping them out for the buzzards to clean up was not something he wanted to do. Along the lines of shooting deer just to leave them lay. The waste of it. Putting up the fur for free to salvage something wasn't a motivation either. Kid had decided the best thing to do was leave them be. Or at least that was what I was told.

Teaching a few 4H classes of younger kids I’ve found very few of them that want to learn everything and even fewer stand out as life long trapper candidates. I see my job as to give them the tools and it’s up to them to choose when to use those tools in the future. The tail bounty has sparked a lot of interest in trapping with the younger folks so that’s a start that might never of been there before.

Dispute all of the constant negative talk as usual a lot of good has come out of the program and there has been a major drop in nesting predators in the last several years in my area some of that should be credited to the bounty program combined with other factors. I have had 5 traps out at a place along a lake with heavy cover using fish for bait and have caught nothing. The complaint was a skunk smell so I should have known better before setting it up. LOL

Kids get a month head start then it’s open to everyone but that’s never a problem with the quota being reached they go over they pay. If the quota is being met or close to being met ( I don’t have a chart to reference) the program is working as intended and the kids are getting out there and learning trapping skills.