Rethinking ‘Pets in Traps’ claims

By Mark Hall

Op-Ed Commentary

Every time a dog or cat is caught in a trap, the story spreads quickly and understandably so. It’s emotional, it’s vivid, and it’s easy to turn into a rallying cry for sweeping changes to trapping laws. Anti-trapping groups compile these incidents from media reports and present them as proof of a systemic failure of trapping regulations. They suggest that trapping regulation need to be “updated.”

But policymaking by headline is not policymaking. It’s emotional arithmetic. When it comes to trapping management where conservation, rural livelihoods, and public safety intersect we can’t afford to legislate based on fear rather than facts.

Some anti-trapping groups acknowledge that governments don’t systematically track trapping incidents and that their lists rely largely on media reports, not comprehensive data. Yet they still present these stories as proof that trapping regulations are failing.

Groups then leverage these numbers to engineer public opinion polls in hopes of creating emotional driven policy changes. When people argue for new safety laws whether about trapping, wildlife conflict, firearms, or anything else they often lean on absolute numbers because they sound dramatic. Numbers like, “dozens” of pets caught in traps or 100 pets since 2015 that sort of idea.

This is exactly what cognitive scientist Daniel J. Levitin warns about in his book A Field Guide to Lies. He calls these statistics “big, lonely numbers”: figures presented without context, without denominators, and without comparison. But absolute numbers alone rarely tell us anything meaningful about risk, causation, or policy relevance.

Risk is about probability x consequence, and it forces policymakers to ask better questions:

A claim like “100 pets caught in traps” tells you nothing about how many traps were legally set, how many trap-days occurred, how many pets were roaming unsupervised, how many incidents involved illegal sets, how many animals were feral or free-roaming cats, or how many animals were killed versus injured versus released unharmed.

Without that context, the number is just a story with a digit attached.

For example, if there are 10 incidents reported each year, but those occur out of 1,000,000 trap-days, the actual risk amounts to just 0.00001 per trap-day. This demonstrates how the raw number alone can be misleading without context about exposure.

Similarly, consider millions of days spent by people and their pets in backcountry recreational activities; if a small number of pets are caught in traps during all those days, the likelihood of a pet being trapped is extremely low often less than one in a million per outing. This illustrates why risk-based evaluation is essential for meaningful policy decisions.

Most recreational backcountry users treat trapping risk as so remote that they don’t change their behaviour at all. They hike with off‑leash dogs, they don’t carry trap‑release tools, and they’ve never sought out training because in their lived experience, the chance of encountering a legal trap is effectively negligible.

Public behaviour is one of the strongest indicators of perceived risk, and here the message is unmistakable: people simply don’t see traps as a meaningful hazard on crown land.

The risk of a pet being struck by a car in Canada is vastly higher than the risk of encountering a legal trap. Why? Vehicle–pet collisions are in the tens of thousands annually. Trap incidents involving pets number only a fraction of vehicle strikes yet traps are treated as a major threat, while far more common hazards cars, poisons and wildlife encounters receive little comparative attention.

Some of the incidents cited by advocacy groups involve traps set illegally. Changing regulations for lawful trappers won’t deter people already breaking the law.

A portion of the listed incidents across Canada involves cats. Canada is home to an estimated 1.5 to five million feral cats, a population so large that it dwarfs the handful of trapping incidents highlighted each year.

When advocacy groups present every trapped cat as a “pet,” they’re collapsing two entirely different realities into one emotional statistic. In truth, the odds that a trapped cat is feral are vastly higher than the odds that it’s someone’s companion. A feral cat caught in a trap is not a failure of trapping regulations it’s a symptom of unmanaged outdoor cat populations.

Conflating feral animals with owned pets inflates the emotional impact without improving public understanding.  A dog off‑leash faces far greater risks than encountering a legal trap.

But the dogs and cats in traps narrative makes for gripping headlines but gripping headlines make for bad policy.

Before rewriting trapping laws, governments should ask: What is the incident rate per trap-day? What proportion of incidents involve legal traps? What proportion involve feral or free-roaming animals? What interventions would reduce risk?

If the answers point to enforcement gaps or pet‑management issues, then those are the areas that deserve attention not sweeping restrictions on lawful trapping.

Stories of pets caught in traps are upsetting. They should motivate us to ask hard questions and address causation. But they should not be used as a shortcut to politically motivated regulation changes built on “big, lonely numbers.” Especially when some groups’ motive is banning trapping completely not updating trapping regulations to improve pet safety.

Absolute numbers are emotionally powerful. Risk metrics are intellectually powerful.

Policy debates often reward emotional narratives. Trapping regulations requires intellectual conversations. Updating trapping regulations deserves evidence, not numerators without denominators.

– Mark Hall is the Executive Director of The Wild Origins Canada Foundation

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