Larry Kline stood knee-deep in a Virginia creek, laying a trap.
He lowered the trap's spring-loaded metal frame -- something like a large mousetrap -- into the current. If a river otter swam through, it would brush against a trigger wire, and then snap! The animal would be caught at the neck by the trap's jaws.
Larry Kline shows how the otter trap, which isn't legal in Virginia until Dec. 1, works. "He'll dive right into the trap, and he'll expire real quick," Kline says.
(Robert A. Reeder -- The Washington Post)
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"He'll dive right into the trap, and he'll expire real quick," Kline said as he demonstrated the trap last week near Dumfries.
Kline wants otters for their pelts, which can fetch upward of $100 each at auction. He's a fur trapper, part of a hidden industry in the mid-Atlantic region that observers say is in the middle of a comeback. Trappers hope it will continue as their work begins this week. The forces behind trapping's resurgence are as far-flung as New York clothing designers, the nouveau riche in China and hip-hop stars with chinchilla tastes.
Their high-fashion choices have trickled down to the backwoods of the East Coast, where people such as Kline are seeing higher prices for one of North America's longest-traded commodities.
For animal rights groups, the resurgence of the fur industry is a disappointment.
They have charged for years that trapping is cruel, especially the leg-hold traps that can prompt some animals to chew off their feet and trappers who bludgeon animals they find alive in the traps.
Trappers rebut these arguments by saying that they strive to give trapped animals a quick and humane death and that their activities are well regulated and pose no danger of exterminating any species.
Trappers are in the woods in Maryland and West Virginia, which opened their seasons this month. Trapping is done in wintertime to catch animals with their long, cold-weather coats.
Virginia opened its season yesterday, though traps set in water, like the "drowning sets" that Kline demonstrated to catch beaver and otter and hold them under, will not be allowed in Virginia until Dec. 1.
State officials estimate that only a few thousand people actively trap in this area. Few do it full time.
"You don't make any money doing this," said Bryan Nelson, president of the Virginia Trappers Association. "Your average trapper is lucky to pay for his expenses over the course of a year."
But everybody agrees the money has gotten better in the past three to four years. A coyote pelt that a trapper might have sold for $17 three years ago was up to $31 this year; otter has more than doubled its 2001 price of about $48 a pelt.
"There was a period in the '90s when fur sales were [down] and trapping statistics were declining," said Camilla Fox of the Animal Protection Institute in Sacramento, Calif. But things are different now, Fox said. "If you look at any fashion magazine right now, you can see the change."
