Julie O'Connor, a co-founder of the Caring Activists Against Fur group and a Tenafly resident, said animals are being trapped in painful devices and confined in cages before being killed and skinned to make coats.
"In the wild, minks and foxes are able to roam for miles," O'Connor said. "If they are raised on a fur farm, they are kept in a cage. You see the animals circle constantly in their cage because they are being driven insane from not being able to move."
At least three dogs were killed by body-crushing traps last year in New York. With your help, though, we can make our woods a little less dangerous.
Barb Kaas heard a commotion in the woods and sensed her Siberian husky, Sage, was in trouble. She was horseback riding Sunday on a trail near her home in Fredenberg Township north of Fish Lake.
Kaas feared the husky may have encountered a wolf, so she rode home to get her husband before investigating. By the time they returned, Sage was dead, caught in a trapper’s size 220 Conibear trap.
Holly, a 4-year-old pitbull mix, lounged on her back at the State House yesterday, begging for a belly rub. But the dog wasn’t there simply for pleasure.
In December 2006, she was the unintended victim of a padded leghold trap in Barre. The trap crushed the bones and damaged the tendons and nerves in her front left leg, resulting in amputation.
Holly’s injuries were cited yesterday at a press conference called to support a current law that restricts the use of body-gripping traps.
Wildlife conservationists and the state renewed a decade-old feud Monday over a constitutional amendment banning fur trapping, debating whether animals could be caught in nonlethal traps and then killed.
In a downtown Denver courtroom far from the state's wilds, District Judge Larry Naves heard arguments about the intent of Amendment 14, which curbed lethal trapping in the state when it was approved by voters in 1996.
