Land of Entrapment
Mike Smith
10 Comments
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It may well be that there are as many reasons to avoid talking about the strangeness of New Mexico as there are reasons to talk about it.
As conversational subject matter, New Mexico’s ghost and UFO stories can make a person seem crazy or gullible. Sharing vague rumors and yet-to-be-researched legends can cast a person as ignorant or dreamy, while bringing up serial killers and bizarre fatalities can make almost anyone seem death-obsessed and morbid. And then there are some subjects that just make us look bad, make us feel bad, force us to recognize things about ourselves or our state that we are ashamed of, that we would rather not acknowledge at all.
For instance, in most New Mexico counties today, for only twelve dollars, a person can obtain a permit to hide an unlimited amount of steel traps on public land, on almost any piece of public land, so long as their traps are more than twenty-five yards away from any existing trails or roads. Some of these traps are designed to crush the heads of the animals that stumble into them, others are designed to slam shut on or even break animals’ limbs, and to hold the animals in place for hours, days, weeks, injured and starving. Hikers, dogs, and children could step into these traps just as easily as foxes or bobcats could, and yet New Mexico’s over seven hundred trappers aren’t required to post a single warning sign or notify any local authorities regarding their placement.
In Alamogordo, in an even more unbelievable example, locals get together every April to round up every rattlesnake they can find, throw them into trashcans and buckets and cardboard boxes, and then kill and skin many of them to cook up and sell to the public. Those snakes that aren’t killed are goaded and harassed into striking at objects for the amusement of onlookers; vendors sell balloons which can be dropped into snake pits for the snakes to attack, and snakes are kicked along the floor or dropped while being used in tricks. On average about two thousand people a year attend this event, the Alamogordo Rattlesnake Roundup—which is combined with a crafts exhibit and a gun show—and over half of those collecting snakes admit to taking theirs from public lands. These snake hunters have gathered as many as one thousand snakes every year since 1986, mostly western diamondbacks, and as most of these rattlesnakes are not listed as endangered species, the area’s Game & Fish representatives do nothing to protect them.
A third form of what many consider to be legalized animal abuse has been featured in the news quite a bit lately—cockfighting. New Mexico and Louisiana remain the last two states in America where gamblers and enthusiasts can still legally congregate to watch two roosters fight to the death. These fights are held in circular pits, and the birds involved usually wear metal spurs attached to their legs, to inflict deeper and more serious wounds on their opponents. According to Alan Dundes’s The Cockfight: A Casebook, such fights likely originated somewhere in southeast Asia several thousand years ago. The first chickens to come to New Mexico most likely arrived with the 1598 expedition led by the Spanish colonizer and explorer Don Juan de Oñate, and with those chickens would have been the first New Mexican roosters and perhaps the first New Mexican cockfights. Today, many New Mexico counties have outlawed cockfighting, and the New Mexico Legislature is currently seriously considering enacting a statewide ban on it, despite loud protests from many New Mexicans who consider it a tradition.
Activists continue striving to end the Alamogordo Rattlesnake Roundup as well—with protests against it every year, online petitions, and an upcoming documentary on the subject—and the group Animal Protection of New Mexico actively campaigns against legalized trapping on our public lands. The ends of all of these practices might just make our state a little less strange, but they might also help make it a place we could be just a little more proud of.
The best part of ending these practices, however, would be that they would allow us all to feel as if we’ve contributed to something good and moral without the majority of us having to actually make any changes in our lives. Some people might not have as much fun at their next gun show, a handful of trappers won’t be able to satisfy their penchants for killing, and various rural New Mexicans will suddenly have to worry about their rooster fights being raided and their roosters euthanized—but for most of us, nothing will change but the headlines. These are causes we can get behind, because unlike bills that threaten to drastically reform the typically deplorable living conditions of the chickens that lay our eggs or the cows that provide our beef—these causes won’t, most likely, raise the price of our breakfast foods, force us to reexamine the ways we eat and shop, or affect us personally in any way. These are causes that deserve our lip service, causes we can wholeheartedly support without fear of having to make any changes for ourselves.
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Reader Comments (10)
Normally I would remove your sort of comment, but in this case I think you've really done a fine job of concisely expressing the opinion of New Mexico's trappers for the general public--of really nailing just how you and New Mexico's trapping subculture view other people, children, and life as a whole.
And, that you left your comment anonymously--showing what some might call cowardice, maybe, I don't know--emphasizes the traits of New Mexico's trapping culture more completely than I could have done in a dozen columns.
Gratefully,
Mike Smith
GOVONER, PLEASE step up!!
Sincerely
Alice Schaub
Oh, and one good thing, Alice: cockfighting isn't legal here anymore, as of a few months ago. So there's that.
I think the state legislature and Governor would do well to consider Alice's comment that she was planning on coming here until she heard about that; if they really want to stimulate growth and tourism--which, though an issue in itself, it seems they do--they should think about how stuff like that makes us look.
Maybe I should just not write about that sort of thing, but I'm not a big fan of idealizing everything and pretending New Mexico is perfect. I'd rather see it get fixed.
Alice, you definitely should visit New Mexico, regardless, but honestly, I've never walked down a desert trail or waited for a seat at a restaurant and thought, Man, I wish we had some more people here. You are undoubtedly a cool person, just for coming to this website, but if you miss coming to this state, the loss will be yours. It's cool here.
REALLY challenges it.
So I’ll just address your statement point by point.
1. “[The picture] is a fake.”
The picture comes from the website for the group Animal Protection of New Mexico. I highly doubt they would need to fake such an image, as trapping does occur within our state, and various government organizations as well as animal welfare groups are sometimes called out to help injured and suffering animals. In addition, if someone were to fake such a photo, particularly using Photoshop as you claim, why wouldn’t they just Photoshop in a real trap? And are all the other gruesome photos on their website faked as well? This looks to me like a steel leg-hold trap, most likely of the long-spring variety. You no doubt want to consider this image a fake, because as someone who sympathizes with trappers, you don’t want it to be true. (A common phenomenon with many issues.)
2. “How many people every see an animal in a trap not very many.”
I consider this an irrelevant argument. If someone is terrible is happening, something that’s really causing a lot of suffering, should we be all right with it so long as most people don’t have to come in direct contact with it?
3. “[L]ook at Arizona when they banned trapping. The coyotes became bold and started attacking children. The foxes became over populated and now rabies is everywhere.”
That’s right, when I think of Arizona, I think of that bordering state I can’t even visit without worrying that my kids will get eaten by coyotes or bitten by a rabid animal. Arizona: The Rabies State. Oh, if only a small minority of legal trappers could get together to control this problem! I’ll look into what you’ve said, but it’s very likely that you’re exaggerating, that you’re villifying these animals just to justify trapping.
4. “It none of your business stick to telling strange stories and leave wildlife management to people who understand it.”
You know, New Mexico’s Tourism Bureau has a great website that will tell you all you want to know about only the good things in our state. My site is not run by them, and my column is not written by them. My column frequently contains stories about New Mexican liars, crazy people, and criminals, and it explores stories of the state’s strangeness, regardless of whether or not these stories make us look like a nice place to move to. In New Mexico, we have the inhumane practice of a Rattlesnake Roundup. We have legalized trapping. We have a mountain getaway where pedophile Catholic priests can go instead of jail. We have drunk driving, domestic abuse, gangs, a meth epidemic, and more.
If my column’s strangeness is typically entertaining, great, but I’m not doing an on-stage vaudeville routine and taking song requests. My apologies if reality offends you, because you’re going to have a tough life—particularly with your barely-there grasp of spelling, syntax, and punctuation.
Oh! I think I lost the challenge. But I’m okay with it.
Sorry, got on my soapbox again. But, no. No trapping --- I'm working on my neighbor here in Hopkinsville to stop his trapping and live catches of raccoons for dog practice. Slowly he is coming to my way of thinking. Now, if I can just get him to use his bow and arrow set correctly with no do-dads--- there just might be some hope for him yet.
Arizona has a horrendous feral dog problem, and it has gotten worse over the past fifteen to twenty years. Newcomers simply cannot understand that it isn't cool to let their mutts run loose, and when Fido goes out with his friends, terrible things happen.