Modern Trapping Part 4 Foot Hold Traps

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Tags: Pathfinder Survival Bushcraft,Trapping,Traps

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water take home bring back them good old days I used to know must've been something a lot Hetal sawmill creek baptized in the heart I got down on my morning guys Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school back with another video in our series on modern trapping we are going to discuss foothold type traps today we've already discussed kana bears we've discussed a little bit about prepping your traps as far as dipping waxing dyeing and things of that nature we'll talk more about that as we go this is going to be a very long series before we go into leg-hold type traps or foothold type traps I'd like to just have a quick discussion about something I've got some pictures that I'm going to post at the end of this video front of the firt acres of america trappers college that i attended with one of my instructors last week we caught lots of animals a lot of people believe that trapping is inhumane and my statement to that would be trapping is not inhumane some trappers are inhumane if you use the correct trap at the correct application for the correct target animal most of the time traps are very humane even traps like these foothold type traps are only designed to hold the animal now of course once in a while you're going to have one that gets run off in other words he breaks his leg off he doesn't chew his foot off necessarily what happens is he gets pinched in between these jaws and if he loses circulation or it becomes numb he doesn't realize it's there anymore they don't have the intelligence to understand that and when they're trying to non bite the trap they bite on their foot so if you hear about something chewing its own leg off to get out of a trap that's probably not true he probably just either wrung its foot off because it was a very small animal in a large trap in other words you caught in a non-target animal we'll talk about that and we talked about adjusting our traps here in a few minutes because that's going to be the main discussion today or you left the animal in the trap too long or sometimes just something happens an accident can't happen or an animal can break his leg or something else can happen where he opens up his skin but for the most part these traps are very humane I'm going to put my hand in a couple of these traps to show you that they really don't hurt they're made for catching the mechanics of the trap do not make the jaws with force they are designed to close the jaws around an object not snap them shut and I'll show you that as we go so we're going to talk about three different types of foothold traps today we're going to talk about a single long spring a double long spring and we're going to talk about a double coil spring or a coil spring tight foothold trap and these three that we're going to talk about are very small they're my favorites they're very good for a SUP reliance type application you can catch most any animal in these depending on pan tension and you're set up to including a coyote now they will definitely hold a fox a coyote maybe able to pull out a large Coon may be able to pull himself out there are some advantages of long springs over coil springs

although the big advantage of coil spring is overall size the weight is about the same but it doesn't take up as much room we'll talk about that as we talk about these one by one but I want to first talk about how to set your trap up and how to adjust your trap so stay with me guys okay guys so as we get started here and excuse me if you are an experienced trapper but I make these videos for everyone to learn from there's a lot of guys out that I've never trapped before so the first thing I want to do is I want to kind of discuss trap components it's very simple this is a number one long spring trap very typical of what you might see hanging in your granddad's garage we're hanging on an old shed somewhere hanging in an antique store this one happens to be a Blake and lamb it is called a single spring foothold trap the components of this trap are very simple you have a pan that moves up and down and this basically fires your trigger to close the jaws you have a dog which is the lever that catches it a notch on the pan so that when the pan is pushed down it releases that trigger and this jaw goes or it releases that trigger the jaw goes underneath the trigger you have the jaws of the trap which are right here and you have the spring and this is the spring and then you have a frame and this is all part of the frame so you've got this back into the frame that holds it trigger the pan is attached to the frame the jaws are attached to the frame and then the spring goes pushes down on the frame and up onto the jaws and the way this trap works you would break this trap down I'm going to do it over on this side break us spring down and push this trap open then you would flip the dog over the top and your pan would sit on top of that dog just like this you've got to let a little pressure on there I'm really not doing this the proper way because I want you guys to get a good view of what this looks like and that's the way that trap is set and just to show you that these are very humane trap I'm going to actually put my hand in this one you have to fold this spring forward toward the dog to get that back jaw to lay down and there I just put my hair in that trap that's stung a little bit but didn't hurt me by any means it's meant to close the jaws that spring lifts up and closes the jaws it doesn't snap them shut on you to break anything it just closes the jaws around whatever's inside of it now they do make what's called an offset jaw which has a space in between the jaws where there's a cutout intentionally to make it not so tight on animals foot

there are also padded jaw traps that have padding on these jaws that close around the animal's foot I spoke very extensively to Pete askins at the trappers college who was they lead design engineer for wood stream who owned Victor Oneida and he told me that even through thorough necropsy of animals that had been trapped and killed that the offset jaw traps and the padded jaw traps really didn't do any more damage to the animal physically than the normal foothold trap did so as you can see I closed it right on my head it didn't leave a single mark didn't hurt me then bruised me just pinched a little bit soon as I pushed the pressure down I was able to pull out that's the advantage of this over a coil spring type trap is the animal really cannot pull against this and push down and get this trap open they can do that sometimes on a coil spring type trap but it's still not very easy and we'll talk about that as we go the back component says trap is basically just a chain you can see that this chain has several swivel points and that's important if you're trying to respect the animal and you don't want him to get twisted and tangled up or being any more pain and he needs to be in that you need swivel points on this trap to keep this chain I'm getting tangled up there's a swivel point at the trap there's a line swivel in the center of this trap there's also a swivel at the double stake into this trap that's double swivel on both sides so there's a lot of swiveling points on this trap where it can be moved around and manipulated it's not going to tangle the chain up or entangle anything else you have a double situation on the back of this thing so this trap can be double staked into the ground and believe me animals can pull out stakes like you would not believe if you single stake this trap and fairly soft ground even with a two-foot stake a Kyle is going to yank that thing right out of the ground he's going to stand up on his back legs and pump that trap up and down until that stake starts to pull out of the ground I see all single stakes that were bent over that were bent actually still in the ground but bent by large raccoons this weekend or this last week so you need to double stake your traps whenever you're able to or use some type of earth anchor we'll talk about those things as we get into trap sets so that is a single spring number one long spring trap okay now let's talk about the double spring now this double spring is a number one as a number 11 long spring and the reason it's called a number 11 is because basically it has two it's a double number one it's a number one long spring trap with two spring so it's called a 1/1 number 11 this is a sleepy Creek that are made in the USA very very good traps it has all of the same components that the other trap had except that it has two Springs on the jaws instead of one which are now in Able's it - even though it's small hole larger animals this would probably hold a coyote barely easily I caught several animals in this trap last week in this particular trap I caught a groundhog and I caught a possum in this particular trap so it's very capable of catching multiple types of animals it has a ring on it that has a drowning lock on it which I'll talk to you about later as well we talked about sets and it has several swivel points with these the easiest thing that you can do with these really is just break them over your leg to set them put the dog to the front break it down over your leg like this push that operating jar that strong jaw what they call it strong jaw which is the jaw that is on the dog side that's called the strong jaw push the strong jaw over and hold it with your hand as long as you're holding underneath the frame and here that traps not going to go off on you at that point you can flip that dog over the top lift your pan from the backside say your hands not inside the trap you lift the pan up from the backside you see how easy that went off and my hands were nowhere near the tribe so break that down again just like we did the first time we'll get our we kind of get below you want to get your dog up out of the way before you do this and as long as I'm holding the frame and I've got my hand underneath the trap it cannot go off on my hand you've got to release a little bit of pressure to get that pan tension before you let go of the trap and again when you set this trap these Springs would be moved forward so that you can relax the weak jaw okay and that's how you would set a number 11 double long spring the more pay attention you have the bigger animal is going to take to trip that trap so if I were targeting Fox and coyote or large Coon I would increase my pan tension I'll show you how to do that in just a minute and that would not allow things like rabbits small groundhogs small opossums and things like that to trip my trap okay so while we're talking about this number 11 long spring let's talk about how to adjust our pan tension and there's two different things that you have to realize there's pan travel and there's pay attention paying travel basically is how far that pan travels from a level position down before it releases the dog okay and that can be adjusted very easily by taking a pair of pliers and bending this frame up or back and that will increase the length essentially of this dog by moving it forward or backward and how deep it goes into the pan itself and we'll make it have to travel further you have to be careful that the pan doesn't travel over the bottom and still not release and you can see this one's just about right

where I've got this set up is when the pan is down there's a little bit of clearance and there's also a window cut out in this pan which is something I really like about these sleepy creeks because you can set that thing up and you can see that window when you're setting that pan okay the other thing that we have to talk about is pan tension pan tension is how much pressure it takes to push that pan down to begin with now obviously your spring and your jaws and things are going to add pressure to that so you can't test that pressure unless the trap is set but you generally want three to four pounds of pressure and there's devices you can buy to test that with for larger animals like Fox and coyote if you're targeting small game animals and I'll show you pictures of rabbits caught in foothold type traps then you need a very light amount of pan tension and there's usually on a lot of traps not all butts most have a screw that goes through the pan right here on a bolt that actually connects that pan to the frame and you can take any screwdriver like the one on a multi-tool or pocketknife or you can take just a regular screwdriver most the trappers at the college carry a pocket or carry a screwdriver with them and a specific tool nut driver that will fit this nut and you can tighten that up to increase how hard it is to push that pan down you can see now that pan is not floppy it's stiff if I loosen that up a little bit now it flops okay that's pay attention that's how you target species now if you have very little pay attention and you're targeting smaller game that's not going to stop you from catching the bigger stuff you're still going to catch the Fox and the coyote the large Coon and things like that to get your trap but in a self-reliant situation where you're just looking for food I try to go with light pan tension because that's what I want to catch smaller animal so when you set this trap you've got your pan tension set where you want it what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to make sure that will not trap a set and ready to be used

see if I get you a good close-up of this when that trap is set and ready to be used that your pan is fairly level you and your pan to be sitting level with the trap you don't want it up you don't want it down you want just the right amount of travel so that when that animal touches it it goes off now again by pushing this forward or pulling this back it increases the depth that this trigger is underneath that pan or what this dog is underneath that pan so this is called the dog or the trigger and it goes underneath your pan now if you're going to test this trap for pan travel or pay attention if you push the weak jaw up and hold on to the frame of the trap not the spring hold on to the frame of the trap you can actually trip this trap in your hand just like this and it's not going to catch you that's the way you test it you can also level up your pan that way and keep your hands out of the way of getting caught in the trap okay the last trap that I want to talk about today it's called the coil spring trap and these traps are generally swiveled from the bottom of the trap they have swivel points within the chain at the end of the chain and most of the time at the bottom of the trap just like the other traps do to keep them from binding up the way this trap works is exactly the same way except the springs instead of being out here and being double long Springs there are two upright Springs that are connected here that spring forward and again all it does is close the trap if you look at the way this trap operates these come up and close the trap there's nothing pushing against these jaws really to snap them shut all that's happening is this is riding up along those two jaws and closing them so to set this trap you're going to push down on both sides just like this again just worry about the strong jaw don't worry about the weak jaw you're going to get that underneath and lift your pan up and again if you hold this by the frame like this you're not going to get hung in this trap go underneath your wheats you ought to set your pan give yourself a little pay attention and let go and again as long as you're holding this trap underneath that weak jaw then you can't look at that trap and you can level that pan up trappers oh it to the animals and owe it to the public to be well educated on what type of traps to use for what type of animals this is a very good trap to use in a self-reliance type situation because it's small you can see it's not very big it doesn't weigh very much it takes a little bit of chain but you can shorten that up if you wanted to and just stake it directly under the trap with just a few inches of chain if you wanted to and put that clear up here on the swivel point you only have you know eight or ten inches of chain underneath that trap instead of the foot and a half that I've got and that would take up less room in your pack we'll talk about other traps as we go in this series like snares we've already talked a little bit about kana bears I've done a video on the versatility of the kana bear but there are quite a few other tricks I want to show you with kana bears as well as different types of sets both in the water along the water's edge and out of the water on land with these traps as well okay guys well I hope that answered some our most of the questions that you might have as a beginner about the different types of foothold traps that can be used for trapping both land and water animals and we can discuss this a little further as we go while we're making sets while I'm showing you what tools to carry and how to use these traps effectively to catch animals like I said I will put a slideshow at the end of this video of animals that I personally caught in foothold traps at the fer takers of American trappers College last week I caught several animals in them they are very very effective traps very good for a self-reliant situation would I carry these in a short-term survival situation absolutely not I'd probably carry snares but if I were talking about long-term self-reliance and food gathering it's hard to beat these foothold traps I appreciate you guys joining with this video I thank for support I thank you for their views I thank you for everything that you do for me for my family and for my school in my business I'm Dave Canterbury I'll be back to another video in this series as soon as I can you