Tribe Of Heart

This information was brought to our attention by Gayle Hoenig, a wildlife rehabilitator/educator in Colorado, who credits Elissa Angell with rescuing these valuable government records from obscurity.

The testimony of Dr. Lillie before Congress provides a vivid portrait of the reality of trapping practices as they impact wild creatures. Dr. Lillie's account is notable both for his attention to detail and for his ability to express the larger implications of the things he saw happening to animals at the hands of the fur industry.

GPO CATALOG NUMBER Y4.M53:94-18
PAINFUL TRAPPING DEVICES
HEARINGS BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON FISHERIES AND WILDLIFE
CONSERVATION AND THE ENVIRONMENT
OF THE COMMITTEE ON
MERCHANT MARINE AND FISHERIES
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
NINETY-FOURTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
ON
H.R 66,H.R.790, H.R.5429, H.R.6651,
H.R.8367, H.R.9918, H.R.10099, H.R.10316,
H.R.10369, H.R.10586, H.R.10652, and
H.R.1077

TO DISCOURAGE THE USE OF PAINFUL DEVICES IN THE TRAPPING OF ANIMALS AND BIRDS

NOVEMBER 17, 18, 1975

Serial No. 94-18

Printed for the use of the Committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries

U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON 1976
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dr. Lillie: Mr. Chairman, I think the best thing I can do is simply make two or three comments actually on some of the statements that were made yesterday that might be of some value to you.

Actually, the reason I am here is that for some years I was in civil engineering and was traveling around I saw the way the human civilization was going. I decided to go back to the medical corp. Then up to Labrador and Mr. Hitler upset the plans for that and I went and spent the war years with the Navy and then in the Antarctic with the whaling fleets.

What I saw there was a drastic killing of the whales with the explosive harpoon. It brought me to the United States after the war where I was to see if we could get some assistance for the equipment needed to do the research to find a humane electrical harpoon.

Well, I was through Washington then and from there I decided to make the film of trapping because I had been crossing America. I called into the Hudson Bay Co. there at Winnipeg and gave them the situation of the trapping. I asked why nothing had been done to get a trap to cause less suffering. And they said, "Frankly, doctor, we haven't given it any thought in all the years since we came into North America."

Well, I decided to start on this film of the trapping, started on that in Scotland-England and then came out here. You know pretty well this story of what we heard yesterday.

Mr. Leggett: Did you make that film yesterday?

Dr. Lillie: No, not that film. The film that I have here takes half an hour. You are very welcome to see it. I can leave it in Washington with Mr. Stevens if that would be satisfactory.

Mr. Leggett: Why do you not do that and we will arrange some time to show that?

Dr. Lillie: I could do that.

What I have seen on the trap lines across Canada was very similar to what you have heard yesterday. I have heard that one of your Congressmen is a vicious animal and I find that quite opposite as I find all of the other animals in North America. The trap, I will leave it here. But in taking there were, we were running trap lines that took 8 days. And in this case is a typical example of what happens in the few days when the animal is caught in the trap. He has enough strength to chew through his paw and he is left that way. Well, the marten, a delightful creature, which brings me to the fact that he had yesterday that the trapping was essential to controlling the animals, to controlling predators, and controlling the numbers of animals themselves, well, as an ecologist I would say unquestionably that predators require strict protecting.

I have worked with the wolves and other animals. I have not met the wolverine. But I find they behave as you treat them. Now, we have got to put this, I think into its context. When we talk about having to control animals we have got to remember that in 500 million years of evolution on this planet there were no wars; the animals were in perfect harmony until the coming of man. So when we come down to talking about a predator requiring control by traps there is only one predator that we need to control by traps and that is the humans.

Now people talk about certain animals becoming pests. If you describe a pest as an animal which in its lifetime borrows more from nature's store than it repays for the use of the future generations then we come to the humbling conclusion that there is only one pest that has ever appeared on this planet. And from where I am speaking I should say no more. What I am saying is the human race today is increasing at quarter of 1 million a day on this planet. The fact is we are going to end up with a semidesert over the whole face of the Earth and if we do not stop on ourselves as an animal to be controlled by whichever means we decide. Then we can see the beginning of the exit of the human race and it looks awfully like that none of the big powers of today are going to exist tomorrow. They are already on their way out. They have passed their peak, every one of them.

Now apart from what we said on the management of the animals, I stress again that all these creatures left alone and leaving nature alone will regulate themselves. There is no animal who ever yet became a pest without man having been either the direct or the indirect cause.

I would close with saying that it would be easy to be popular in any walk of life provided we are minding our own business and keep quiet about an awful that is mean and rotten. But it can be at the terrible expense of the loss of respect for ourselves. I think you would agree with me there Mr. Chairman.

That is the best I can do under the circumstances without going into a comparison with what we had on the trap lines yesterday. And, as I said, as I close again, it seems to me that we would be so much happier in the world if we could aim at an ultimate object of being able to say that no matter what creature we meet, that creature should have felt better for having met us.

Mr. Leggett: Very good. Thank you for your philosophy introduced here.

Dr. Lillie: I will leave the film.

Mr. Leggett: Mrs. Irwin, you are the president of the Humane Society of
Bucks County?

Mrs. Irwin: Yes sir. I am also the Director of the Federal and the State Humane Society. You have my statement.

Mr. Leggett: That will be In our record.

Mrs. Irwin: I would like to make a small correction on page 2. At the numeral 1 about one-third of the way down the page the word "it"
should be replaced by section 3(a)(1)

Mr. Leggett: All right. That correction will be made.

Mrs. Irwin: I am very much impressed with what Dr. Lillie has said, and I am going to waive reading the statement. I would like......

Mr. Leggett: That will be incorporated into our record.

[The statements of Dr. Lillie and Mrs. Irwin follow:]

Mr. chairman, Mrs. Stevens notified me in England that you would like me to speak to you of my personal experience over many years of the trapping of the wild creatures in my own country and others including North America. This in connection with a bill you have in Congress that you are now contemplating.

I am indeed grateful to you for your concern about this trapping. What you decide to do to overcome the tragic suffering, will have a tremendous impact on other countries.

My own background in this matter: After some years as a civil engineer, I became concerned at what the spread of our civilization was doing to our environment. To the garden of this planet that had been the home for so many millions of years of the creatures who had so generously extended their hospitality to this animal Man to share it with them.

Dr. Grenfell of Labrador wanted the land of his work opened up with a flying ambulance service. With plans to join him for a time I returned to my old university of St. Andrews in Scotland to do a course in medicine and surgery.

The first practice was in the Shetland Islands as a rehearsal for Labrador when Germany marched into Poland. That was the end of those plans. I landed instead on the North American Convoys, the Mediterranean, and finally the Far East.

In 1946-47 it was as surgeon with a whaling fleet in the Atlantic that I saw it take up to an hour to tear and blast the lives out of the magnificent whales; surely the finest creature this world will ever know. As explosive harpoons were fired to burst in their intestines, I realized that at least half my life would have to be concerned with our fellow creatures and the rest with humans.

It was in 1948 that I came out to the United States to try to get help with the necessary equipment for research into evolving an electrical harpoon that would not cause suffering; although it was only a temporary step to ending the killing of these creatures altogether.

That journey took me to Washington here for discussions with many of you, including your Dr. Remington Kellogg of the Smithsonian Institution.

Then out across Canada to the whaling station on Vancouver Island. It was then I met the men connected with the fur trapping, and found that the intensity and duration of the tortures inflicted were at times worse than in whaling.

Back across Canada I worked through the winter of 1948-49 at Twillingate Hospital in Newfoundland, when in the spring of 1949 I was surgeon to 25 ships of an International sealing fleet hunting the Harp seals out in the pack ice of the open Atlantic. Adult seals lay on the floes with bullets through their lungs and intestines. While making a documentary film of it all, I lay down beside some of them that pushed their heads under my open jacket as they died.

I returned to Britain and got on to Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth to tell them I wanted their help to cut down the suffering in the fur trade. I got the answer that Royalty was unable to be concerned with anything controversial.

Early in 1951 I was in Australia where I found commercial trapping of rabbits on a far greater scale than in Britain. There where the spring steel leg hold trap was being used, deep pits were dug, into which the rabbits with their broken legs were thrown and left to flounder on their smashed stumps to keep them alive in the heat of the day, until evening when they were killed and taken to the freezer plant.

I was learning fast. Back in Scotland I started on the film TRAPLINES, involving the rabbits both trapped and wire snared. Then I headed, for Canada.

It was December, 1951 the Canadian Pacific freighter Beaverlake headed over the Atlantic with equipment to film your fur trapping and to study the medical situation across your North America at the same time. Just beyond mid-Atlantic we passed the Canadian Pacific's Empress of Scotland heading home with Philip and Elizabeth after a Canadian visit. I tried again this time to get a radio message to them about the trapping. But the Captain of Beaverlake was doubtful about how it would be received, although I knew Canadian Pacific's General Manager would have backed me all the way.

So we pushed on into the wilderness. First the Pre-Canadian Shield country between the Great Lakes and Hudson's Bay, when I had Ontario's Chief Field biologist Tony De Vos with me and two of his trappers.

Ermine were taken, killed quickly caught across the back. But martens suffered terribly with the traps set in what are called "cubbies." Artificially built shelters baited with such as fish or other meat. They are beautiful creatures doing their work of controlling mice and squirrels.

Then I was flown deeper into the wilderness by one of the bush pilots to
join two other trappers, an Indian and Russian.

Where the rabbit trapper of Scotland visited his traps daily, the Canadian trap line took 8 days to get round with our using snow shoes. There the trapped animal could be left for up to those 8 days, and more in bad
weather.

Beaver trapped below thick ice could drown in a few minutes. The Fisher, like a huge marten, and about the size of a domestic cat, with a balancing bushy tail, the finest of the weasel family, is the happy clown of the woods. Where the first had been caught, the whole ground around the trap had been torn up and the cubby wrecked. After days and nights he had torn himself loose leaving half a front paw behind.

Then it was on westwards to the land below Lake Athabaska to Primrose Lake where I joined a French Canadian with two dogs to handle the sledge.

Squirrels were snared with wire loops fastened to poles placed as run-ups beside their shelter holes. Some of them hung upside down for a sadly long time caught by the lower belly.

Towards Wapiti Lake 90 miles to the North of Primrose was the scene of another tragedy. A rare Great Grey Owl in a squirrel trap. The Squirrel had just come to the trap when the owl had pounced on him and sprung the trap with one leg. The frenzied panic had left its pathetic picture. The owls and hawks are all sensitive and timid. Too timid to want to hurt others when not driven by hunger. This one had tried to fly up with the trap and chain, clawing the spruce foliage with his free foot and battering his wings until the trap and chain dragged him down to lie gathering strength for another attempt. How many dawns had he seen from that trap before hunger and exhaustion ended it? I found him wings still stretched across the snow, his eyes wide open but frozen white.

At Wapiti Lake cabin, the limit of our trapline, we had no food left, just the frozen fish ration that belonged to the dogs. Alec DeRocher skinned and ate the squirrels while I gently opened up the owl and ate the liver and that courageous tiny heart. Was it psychological that it gave me strength out of all proportion for the hard going home?

That night in my sleeping bag on the floor of the cabin, I dreamed a big Beaver was climbing gently on to my Jacket pillow. It woke me and I felt something moving at my hair, then retreating to the floor. In the beam of my torch, there was a little White Footed mouse; and in her mouth a great faggot of what looked suspiciously like my hair. She scampered off to where an old broken piece of armchair lay in a corner. I waited in the dark and she was back almost at once and up at my head, her tiny pink hands and teeth cutting the required lengths for that nest. I went to sleep again thinking it was so nice to know that man, the only true pest in Nature, was at last of some use to at least one little person in that vast wilderness.

At the last camp we had only an old sugar bag shelter, slung between two trees. I slept for a time nearby to keep a fire going and woke in the morning to find the wolves had come right up to us in curiosity during the night. They had not showed themselves in daylight although we knew they were there. What man missed in life through showing the other animals his cruel unfriendliness. Knowing that you were ostracized by the wild creatures, the knowledge that you were feared in that wonderful land made for so much loneliness. What had our Planet and its fine forms of life done that man should have been inflicted on it? "Every other living thing, the Flowers, Trees, and the Birds and other Animals all do their best to show him how life was given him to be lived." We had lifted all our traps now to take them back to base, doing the 90 miles back to Primrose Lake in 2 days with just a 3 hours rest. As I walked out in the moonlight I felt the outlet of my stomach inflamed from the tension of knowing constantly what the creatures went through at our hands. But it quieted again when we knew this time that we had left no traps set behind us. I was sad to leave those two grand dogs behind at Alec's home.

Another bush plane took me south to another trapline still in Saskatchewan at Meadowlake. With trapper John Evans, our first casualty was a skunk fallen foul of a mink trap. Day after day he had been dragging at the trap and chewing the smashed leg. He was shivering, with his head resting on the trap and his eyes closed when I lifted him up with the trap. He was quiet as I got the mangled leg free and layed him on the snow. He dragged himself down the bank of a stream of running cold water close by, through the water and disappeared under an overhang on the far side. Nature would take care of him. He would die in the den she had prepared for him. Or he would recover to be able to forage on three legs, with a slow healing stump that might be of some use.

Next morning we found a Beaver that had a hind leg into a heavy trap set where the ice was thin at a feed bed. A young beastie and there had been no drowning. He was only half submerged, dead and stiff. Exposure, shock, and fatigue through a bitter night. The bank, snow, willow feed sticks and ice were churned to porridge. The others of his family in their house must have heard it all and gone through almost as much misery.

In the days ahead, out in the more open country, Coyotes were found dead after they had dragged traps attached to heavy anchor poles up to a mile or more.

Searches ended so often with a whole paw in the jaws. Or they would be tangled completely in a wire snare, after having chewed every bit of tree bark around as they gradually strangled. They too then froze stiff. A vicious wolf snare had cut into the neck of one. When close to suffocation, the wire had perforated the windpipe. The rush of air into the lungs had brought a fresh burst of struggling that forced the wire right through the windpipe to the backbone, when a sudden bursting of a neck artery had ended the torture. And this was just one trapline. One corner of a tremendous continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific that throbbed with long drawn out agonies night and day for months.

John was quiet that night. "Doc, It's a shocking business. It never hit me this badly before." He sat with his head in his hands looking at the floor of his hut.

Next day was the last before leaving Meadowlake. A Magpie was the first casualty, dead with both legs in a squirrel trap. Where the forest had been part clear felled, John had set a coyote trap close to an old derelict homestead. There was nothing there and the trap gone. Snow was falling for the first time since Primrose Lake.

For half and hour we searched in widening circles until John shouted. What had been a beautiful happy creature who with his friends had sung us to sleep in the cabin was now an emaciated twisted body. He had dragged the trap with its heavy anchor pole until the chain had snarled on a fallen tree. His smashed leg and paw was stripped to the splintered bone in the trap jaws. 0ne single chewed sinew alone had held him from getting away on three legs. He had no strength left to chew the sinew. Had he escaped he could no longer have caught even a mouse to help him keep alive.

John stood looking down at the lovely head pillowed on the trap. "Harry, I forgot about this trap until this afternoon. Six weeks since I set it. I reckon I deserve all that's coming to me for this. Poor bastard. Day after tomorrow I'll start to check every foot of this line, just in case. And I guess I'm going to end up lifting every trap, snares and all. Oh Christ yes. It's all wrong Harry. I'm sorry. Poor little devils. What harm do they ever do to us that we do this to them? These coyotes live on the snowshoe hares that would eat the new forest to pieces but for these coyotes."

The little wasted body was lifted up to our sledge. The remaining sinew parted. There gentlemen is the trap and the paw that has gone with me to many countries. To try to give the women of fashion in this world a slight idea of what their vanity is doing. To try to show these men who make the money just for what they are responsible in their pandering to sex crazed fashion.

Through the years of trying to get traps that will kill without suffering, it has been as in the search for a harpoon that will end the dreadful explosive harpoon in whaling. Why have we gone on torturing the creatures, knowing it is wrong? No matter how we research there is only one clean answer, an end to the whole viciously cruel business.

There is talk of loss of livelihood of trappers. There is no sound livelihood for trappers only for fur houses. The only creatures for which there can be any justification put up for taking them at all are the Muskrats. They have a flare-up in numbers about every seven years, when a mutation of one of their own body organisms wipes them out soon after. Nature's control in a cycle of her own. Another example of her syndrome of the Lemmings of the Tundra.

Spring came to the wilderness as I got into the town of Moose Jaw Saskatchewan. In the hotel an Indian in his fifties came to see me. He introduced himself as Mac. In the carpeted lounge we talked of the day before white man had come. There were quiet pauses when as he stared out of the window I saw a man with the aquiline features of his ancestors. "Dr. Harree you have seen much suffering also after the wartime. I speak now from my people who are Ojibway. Gray Owl said to you why white man wanted the lands of our people. He has brought death to our land. Everywhere is death, for money, to us, to our friends of the Wilderness."

The government needs help to understand the wilderness. White man has to obey the laws if he is to live more. When my people killed we explained to the animal why it had to be and would he help by lending us his life. White man does not ask permission. Now his own life will be taken away. There is no love in him. Where there is no love there is death. He will die of the terrible disease of the mind. He is in fear now that he will die from his own hand.

You have seen what white man has done to the sea whale and the seal people.

You Dr. Harree will have much more suffering. But it is good. You must take white man's children with you in their minds before they are made evil too. White man is going to die to learn to live. Then perhaps he will be able to come again." Then he took my hand, gently with his that was finely shaped for the hard life he had had. "I think my people will be with you."

Gentlemen. I return finally to the little Marten of the Little Missinaibi in the Ontario wilderness.

On his trapeze acts in the treetops, a whiff of the fish in the cubby must have reached him and he had investigated. So had his world of happiness and now anticipation changed to the misery of body and mental agony. Frantic licking of the lacerated leg with the awful possibility that in the freezing temperature his tongue could stick to the trap steel - frequent pauses in the struggling while the small body was convulsed in trembling. I have never known a trapped animal cry out when it knew a man was near, the whimpers were only for himself.

All through the night to the dawn of another day. If only the Great Horned Owl would come, or Fox, or Wolverine. They would know what to do quickly.

There would be stress ulceration of the intestine and agony from necrosis of the heart muscle as was inflicted on the little rats in the research laboratories. Did the fashion magazines give a thought to the awful cost as they displayed the tortured beautiful skins that covered the selfish human bodies beneath?

It had been at least five days of agony now. For it was 5 days since the last snow that lay undisturbed over the part of the cubby that had been wrecked in the first frantic struggle. I got the trap jaws open to release the pulverized paw that had played its part so well in getting this little Marten through the trees. Yes, I too licked the mangled muscles and bone that were once his leg and now lying in my hand. Waves of his brave spirit seemed to flow into myself. The trap lay to one side. The weapon that women in the worship of themselves had put into the hands of money worshipping men.

I felt myself shivering although not aware of the cold. With him under my shirt his head was resting against my neck and I thought back to the pack ice and the seals that had their heads under this same jacket.

As he got warmer he stared and stared up at me as though looking for an answer to it all. Then he looked up at the trees where he had done so much happy acrobatics.

To me the Power of Creation that cares for the Wilderness and its creatures in this world and away beyond, is very, very, real: The harmony that runs through all life is so evident. The way there is concern for all, through the seasons, is beyond our capacity to comprehend. Where then does man in his present behavior have any place at all and how long is he going to be tolerated. What we had done to this little Marten was beyond what this planet had ever known before. I could only say "Boss, in the years I have left here, if I am not to be able to do anything to end this tragic trapping, unable to do anything to end the misery to the whales or any other, then I am ready to go on with this little Marten to where I can be of use."

Marten stared again. Maybe at what I was thinking. Then as though his question was answered, his eyes closed. The pain seemed to have gone as I walked a bit along the trail with him, hoping that the motion would be something as when he had been inside his mother. He licked my neck, perhaps for the salt that was there. Then we came back to the frozen stream. Spring would come with the vibrating melody of the nesting Warblers around the spot where the vanity of men and women had brought tragedy.

One actress in particular I had tried to get to understand. "Don't tell me. I'm too fond of my fur coat." "All right, but if before very long you find yourself in pain with a fatal disease, perhaps it will come to you that you're getting only a fraction of what you have inflicted on others."

What happened to her I don't know. But two patients in England who persisted in hunting otters to death, were warned in the same way. Two years later It happened, to them both. They became the most pitiful exhibition of self pity. They who had never had any for other creatures.

Little Marten I think was contented at last. Again came that steady enquiring look followed by his head once more on my neck. This time hands other than mine lifted him.

I don't remember returning to the cabin. Tom Cagagee was stretching Beaver pelts later that evening when Chris Elankoff returned from a stroll out on the lake. He sat quietly saying nothing. I knew he was worried about the treatment his parents were getting at the hands of the Soviets. Perhaps it was that which had helped to bring him to a realization of what man's trapping was inflicting on the animals.

Mr. Chairman, this bill has surely to be something more than just another bill. Surely it must be a step in our nursing of our wilderness lands back to the health and happiness they once had, and to nurse mankind back to a better understanding with them.

In those two World Wars our men and women, so many of them gave up what remained of their lives here to give us the chance to leave this world nearer to its original clean decency than we found it. Not left as the technological, computerized, automated nightmare of selfishness we have called economic progress which we say has to pay financially, whatever that means. Progress towards What?

The first European countries started prohibition of the leg hold trap in the 1930's. England outlawed hers in 1958 after a long battle. Finally there was pressure from our Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the Department of Agriculture that had thought more about itself than it did about its other obligations.

Our rabbits are controlled now by gassing, quick killing traps set in the burrows, by shooting and netting with the use of ferrets. There have been no regrets at our ending of the steel trap. I am sorry to say Scotland continued its use for foxes until 1973 and there are still abuses through a new industrial type of estate owner employing the wrong kind of management.

Mr. Chairman, I have seen the bill you propose. I hope not many will be in favor of it only because we are concerned for our own particular pets getting hurt. Our obligations are in return for the hospitality we have received from all our fellow creatures that had this planet as a home for so many millions of years before man was heard of.

Could this bill not help toward the ultimate aim, essential for us to be allowed to survive ourselves, that no matter what form of life has shared its planet home with us, it feels the better for having met us.