20 Lost Trapping Methods That Are Easy to Learn and Legal to Try

In the winter of 1938, a marsh trapper named Ovide Landry poled his pirogue out into the flooded marsh of Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, before the sun was up, and by the end of that season he had pulled better than four thousand muskrats out of the mud. They called it marsh gold, and it was — a good rat brought near a dollar when a day in the cane fields brought a dime. Ovide owned no fine gear. A wooden boat, a sack of steel traps, and one thing his grandfather had taught him about the animal itself. That one thing is number one on this list. Almost all of it is gone now — the fur market collapsed, the marsh drained, the knowledge with it. But here is what nobody tells you: most of what Ovide knew is still perfectly legal to do today, in season, with a license in your pocket. The very first set he ever learned as a boy, the blind set, is number nineteen — and you could make it this weekend. Most people think trapping is a cruel steel jaw hidden in the leaves, and something you're not even allowed to do anymore. The truth is stranger, and gentler, and closer than you think. Number sixteen is a trap you can build from a wooden box, and it catches the animal alive and unhurt. Number seven is the one that made Ovide the best rat man in the parish — reading the animal so well he knew where it would step before it did. And number one is the reason he never needed anything money could buy. These are the skills that clothed this country for three hundred years, back when a farm kid ran a fur line all winter and paid the mercantile bill with hides. Then we forgot them. Hit that subscribe button, because most of this was never written in any book — it was learned in the cold, on the water, one empty trap at a time. Let us count down the twenty lost trapping methods that are easy to learn and legal to try.