The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-11-11
TRAPPING.

Last winter while riding in an elee-
 tric street car, noticed a sweet-faced
 woman on the opposite side absorbed
 in the pages of that good little magazine
 Our Animal Friends A few minutes
 later, as the car stopped to take on a passenger, we heard a commotion in
 the street outside, and looking, we saw
 man beating a horse which had fallen
 on the icy pavement. The sweet-faced
 woman sprang to her feet, and with
 the single ejaculation, "Oh! you brute!'
 hurried off the car and summoned a policeman. followed to see that the fellow got all that was coming to him,
 and he got 1t 'too, before "The Society
 With the Long Name had finished
 with him. But there was just one
 amusing thing about this whole affair the sweet-faced lady who pushed the case with so much courage and energy
 wore on her person set of furs which
 had cost the lives of twenty animals, each one of which had probably suffer-
 ed far more pain and misery than the
 horse, over the treatment of which she had been so wrought up. Of course,
 had she seen those animals suffering,
 1t would have wrung her heart, but as she did not see 1t, and as in all proba-
 bility no one had called her attention directly to the matter, she simply wore the furs and thought nothing about it. Disasters which overtake those whom we do not personally know, af-
 feet us in inverse proportion to the distance at which the disasters occur If a man falls from our roof, and breaks his neck on our door step, We are deep- ly shocked, we cannot eat our dinner, and we have received impressions which we can never get rid of as long as we live. If the same accident happens in the next town, we feel sorry, and may l even help to support the mans widow,
 but the shock is comparatively slight. If it occurs in Europe somewhere, we are not shocked at all in the proper l sense of the word, and if the news of comes from China, we simply pay no attention to 1t. Yet the magnitude of the disaster is the same in each case, the physical suffering as great in China
 as in our own back yard. This is the reason that we wear furs; If we say the muskrat whose peIt We propose to
 use for cap, gnawing it's leg off in a | steel trap. we would choose some other
 material for the cap, but as we don't
 see 1t, we don't worry about it.
 If there is a hell for those who ir- 1 fiict unnecessary cruelty on animals certainly the trappers, buyers and
 wearers of furs will be sent to the hot
 test corners Of it. The misery caused | by the barbarous practice of slaugh- tering birds for millinery purposes,
 great as it has been, wSs not circum- stance to that brought upon the four l footed creatures whose skins are in
 demand to supply the fur trade. In the | first place, the instrument used in pro- l curing most of these furs is the steel 1 trap, an essentially cruel device Most of the animals to be caught are strong, l healthy, vigorous creatures, whose 1 struggles would soon result in their escape from any trap whose jaws did 1 not hold them with & merciless grip Most of the ur-bearing animals are very tenacious of life, and when caught
 in trap are apt to live for days unless
 killed by the trapper or by some other
 wild animal Trappers in small way
 of business set a few traps and are able to visit them every day, and in
 such cases the captured creatures can 1 not suffer for more than twenty-four
 hours. But even so, think of the tor
 ture endured by wild thing lying in
 the jaws of a steel trap for a single
 night. You simply cannot imagine it
 unless you happen to have an experi-
 ence similar to that of a trapper l
 met some time ago. He was returnina
 to camp after & long and wearisome
 day, during which he had had nothine
 to eat since four in the morning. He
 still had five miles to go, when, as ht
 made his way through a narrow ravint