Modern Trapping Part 5 Intro to Snares and Snaring

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http://www.thepathfinderschoolllc.com

Tags: Pathfinder Survival Bushcraft,Trapping,Snares

Video Transcription

even good

back in the woods morning guys Dave Canterbury the Pathfinder school out here on the Pathfinder school property I wanted to go over a video today on our trapping series on snares we're going to talk about what makes a good snare versus what doesn't make it good snare simple components of a snare we're going to talk about set locations for snaring and we'll talk about a couple simple things as far as how to set up a snare and simple things you can use to set your snares now I would recommend that you buy snares it's my experience especially lately you know I just graduated from the trappers college for the first occures of America and I can tell you I saw what larger animals will do to a cable snare like large raccoons and things like that and they flat destroy them so one of the things you need to remember with snaring is if you're planning on snaring in a short term medium term or longer term survival situation think about the fact that one snare means one animal because it can not always but it can definitely mean that one time you use that snare it's completely useless to be used again as a snare snares have memory in them and you have to exercise that memory when you create a snare unless you buy a snare that already has that memory set into it but once an animal gets into that snare twisted up tangles it up wraps it around three or four different trees it's pretty much useless you've got to cut it off the animal and most of the time you're either gonna have to do one of two things the enemy will generally be alive when you get there so you're going to have to dispatch him with like a 22 revolver right to the head or you're going to have to catch him with some kind of a new source ner pull situation that you can make or buy and then hold him down cut the cable and then carry him off keep him in a distance from you with the snare Pole and release a non-target animal so think about all of those things when you talk about snaring now how effective is snaring I'm going to put a short slide show at the end of this video to show you just exactly how effective snare can be and show you animals that I personally and my instructor Tony Daniels caught in snares two weeks ago or week before last or last week I think it was at the FIR takers of American trappers College on a 12,000 acre wildlife area the area that we're in now at the Pathfinder school backs up to a four thousand acre wildlife area we have plenty of game out here we have a trapping class coming up in December I encourage you to join us if you'd like to on survival trapping we're going to use snares set snares we're going to talk about Connor bears we're going to talk about footholds and all of those things but the questions I get a lot about our snares because they're so light and you can carry a lot of them into any type of situation that you want to get yourself some meat and snares don't take up a lot of room of your packing they're very very effective so we'll talk about those right now okay so I've got a couple of ziplock bags that have two four types of snares in them right here and there are half a dozen snares in each one of these bags so this is one dozen snares and these would be what I would consider good enough to put in my bag in a survival bug out short term medium term situation they're fairly heavy-duty this one is a 360 force this one is larger this one is what's called seven by seven which means as seven inner strands with seven outer strands wrapped around it this cable here would actually hold a small medium sized deer very very easily if you were to snare a deer in a survival situation this will definitely hold anything up to a medium large raccoon anything bigger than that you're going to want something like this now let's talk about how snares are made and how they operate real quick now you can make snares out of a lot of things and you can make them out of piano wire you can make them out of guitar strings you can make them out of picture wire all kinds of things you can make snares out of what you're not going to have with those types nares is you're not going to have this memory where this thing just hangs perfectly in a snare cable okay and this one has a locker on it and it's a slide lock so that when something touches it it slides down and the way that's set up is it's just a piece of wire ran through that locking device so that when something enters the snare and hits it it immediately closes down on them and it does not go back it can't loosen up on the animal it only gets tired now some states require you to put locking mechanisms in this wire that will prevent the snare from closing past a certain distance and that's considered more humane so it doesn't just keep getting worse and worse and tighter and tighter on the animal because you can see that thing will closed down as small as you want it to but what you want is you want to find out where the best spot is on that snare as far as the loop goes and that's how you want to wind your snare so when you want your snare back up you want to keep that loop in that cable okay now you also have a swivel point that's blocked off with a washer here any swivel points are pretty important and the reason they're so important you'll see in some of the pictures that I put at the end of this video animals will tend to get hung any snares twist flip around go over and under things and kind of roll around in circles and if you don't have this it's going to bind your wire up even worse than it needs to be and then the chance of saving your snare are even more slim so having this on here gives the animal comfort but it also helps to save your snare a little bit as well and this one was set up together be staked into the ground or wired off to a solid object and we'll talk about that in a moment as well the other component that it has besides a locking device which is connected to the end of the line right here and then it goes over the top right here to make your snare is what's called a whammy okay it's very important that you have this whammy on here and you'll see when we talk about simple sets of snares how important this whammy is and this whammy basically is just a plastic or rubberized collar that's very small that allows you to put something through it like a trap stand that you can make from just a stick a piece of wire a coat hanger which is what I'm going to show you how to use a coat hanger they work very well for this and they don't take up much room and they're pretty pretty close to free to get so that's what we're going to use for our snare stand now those are the components that I think you need on a snare to make it a good capable snare that's going to do a lot for you when you start making snares that are less mechanical than this or less complicated than this like just from picture wire or piano wire guitar wires things of that nature small pieces of wire in general you have basically put yourself in a position where you're almost back to primitive trapping you can make almost the same type of snare with a heavy piece of bank line and probably not going to chew through the wire like they would through the bank line but the chance of them breaking it or not operating correctly and things of that nature those percentages decrease the more primitive your snaring methods become so having a good modern snare like this with lockers on it is very important I'm going to show you one of these other heavier ones right now like I said this thing will hold up to and including something the size of a small deer very easily if it had to that's not saying that you're targeting deer that's saying that in a situation where it was a longer term sustainability type situation and you snared a deer this type of cable would hold that animal and the way these are set up is exactly the same way just a little different mechanisms on them as all you've got to make sure you get this unwrapped exactly the right way you can see the the memory loop in that snare and the slide you see how fast that fell okay that's a fast snare right there these are the ones that we saw on our website and that's why we sell them because they're made in the USA they're bulletproof and their immediate they're fast when you hang this in a snare location what you want to happen is you don't want that animal to have to pull on this snare for it to tighten up all you want is for him to have to touch it and it tightens up on him as soon as he touches that line it it tightens up around his body his neck or however you've caught him and most animals you're going to find you're going to get caught around the body they're not going to get caught around the neck very often again it has a whammy on it right here we'll talk about that in a few minutes and it just has a loop where it's been wired over and crimped off and that loop allows you a little bit more flexibility than just staking and I like the longer snare this is like a three foot snare a three and a half foot snare and the reason I like these longer snares is because of the way you can connect them and disconnect them so easily without having to stake them and I'll show you that when we start setting these up in a minute so again to wind this thing up get this thing feed us through to its best loop size which is about right there that's about where it likes to sit and then again as soon as something hits it boom they're snared so I'll open that thing up to its spot and then just wrap it around a few times wrap the line through it three or four times and put in the bag very important that you take care of your snares now let's talk about snares as far as getting them ready to be used all right you do not have to watch the snare you do not have to dip a snare you do not have to even necessarily die a snare all of those things are unnecessary which makes them again less of a hassle to use in a normal trap that you want to watch and die and things like that because it's not necessary you can take a snare and then work with kana bears as well you really want to walk wax them either but you can take a snare and hang it on a fence and spray-paint it if you want to make this thing in more natural color you can spray paint it with a brown or a green paint whatever the case may be you're not going to hurt the snare a bit doing that or you can just leave it out and let it oxidizing an actual rusty color to it in which case I'd cut it with some fixing wax after the fact to keep it fast but a lot of guys I know that I met at the trappers College just liked to paint them they don't do anything else but paint them they don't boil them they don't do anything else they don't clean them they take them out of the package they spray them down and hang them on the fence for a few days after they've been painted and they're ready to rock this set of snares that I showed you to begin with has been dipped in speed dip and that's it and they're ready to rock okay so with all that said now we're going to talk about snare stands and I've got two hangers here and I just bend them in half to put them in annoying pack here but these are just to regular wire coat hangers and these are we're going to use to make our snare stands with I just wanted to show you that they were coat hangers before I cut them up with a pair of wire cutters so you can see exactly what they were before we got started here okay so I'll fold them back up and put them back in my pack and then we'll talk about them in just a minute because I want to talk about location with you for a second first now before we go into location we need to talk about tools what are you going to need for tools to set a snare well you really don't need a lot I mean you need a pair of wire cutters and you probably got those on your multi-tool you're going to need something like that just to cut your coat hangers or whatever you're using for your stand or you can use wood for your stand but wire connected to wood works really well too the other thing that I like to carry with me when I'm snaring is these double into clips and I'll show you why these are so handy in a few minutes but when you've got that loop on the end of your cable snare it's about three and half four feet long these things are ideal for just bouncing boom-boom-boom you're on the move you're setting snares maybe leaving them a couple days moving to the next spot we'll talk about that in a few minutes as well and then some type of a pair of pliers like I said I generally will carry a set of trappers pliers with me like lineman's pliers on top of a multi-tool and I like to carry a set up like pruning shears with me as well that are just you know regular pruning shears that you'd use to prune when you're guarding with but they work really good for cutting small branches and things real quick to make snare stands and we'll talk about that as we go as well so let's go look at a game trail talk about how to pick game trails and then we'll talk about how to set those trails okay here's a game trail coming out of the woods right here to an open field now that's probably some type of small game it's not beat up too bad but it's not used very much either unless it's just rabbits using it so I would probably go down that trail a little bit pick it in there a little bit and see if I can find some rabbits scat or something like that because they poop everywhere they don't have toilets like some animals do like river otter they just go wherever I might check that out but I'd be looking for a better spot than that to be honest with you so let's move on down the line down the wood line here a little bit see if we can find a better example okay here's a good example of a trail that I would probably want to set this thing is well worn down you can almost see bare dirt in certain areas where the animal has been traveling this it's pretty thin as far as narrowness goes there is plenty of area for a deer to get through here and a deer could be using this trail but other game will travel this trail as well and we can set our snare to eliminate catching a deer and only catch our target animals and we'll show you how to do that right now okay now I moved quite a bit of stuff right here that I wouldn't normally have moved but I wanted you guys to be able to see in here real good with the camera so what we're going to do is if we were going to set a cable scenario on this trail a good place to do that's between these two trees because it's a good choke point and we can build up a few things animals are going to take the path of least resistance so we need to make this the path of least resistance and we can funnel them in a little bit I'm going to save one of these sticks to use for a trip stick for a deer a minute but we can take some things that are laying here beside the trail and we can kind of funnel in this area a little bit and open the trail up and just pile some of the junk up on both sides and that will kind of run them right into our snare we can take this junk and pile it up on this side as well the same way and just leave this in their path open and then we're going to put our snare we'll clean out a little bit okay now here's where the importance of that wammy comes in and that snare stand so we're going to take our coat hanger we've got right here and our pliers we're going to make a snare stand the way we're going to do that is we're just going to cut one side of this coat hanger off just like this where I've got it bent in half and this part right here is going to be my snare stand now what I'm going to do with this is after I straighten it out pretty much I'm going to bend this over right here on the front in an L just like that and that's really all I need to do now I can position this wire the rest of the way in the ground and I've got at least 3 more snare stands in these two coat hangers so I'll put them back in my pack now I'm going to use this lighter cable snare that hasn't been dyed or anything so that you guys can see a little bit better what I'm doing so I'm going to grab one of those out of there and undo it very carefully just like this and remember everything's got to be unwound just right you can see how fast that thing is I mean all you have to do is just bump it bump it in it goes this drops right down that's what you want in a good snare that's why I chose this company snares to carry on my website now you've got that whammy and that whammy that piece of rubber tubing is what you're going to use to connect that snare right here and then you can pull that through to the exact loop size that you want so you open up your loop and if I'm looking to snare Coons I'm looking for a loop about the size of that all right something a little bigger around than my fist all the way around to give myself a little play figuring out Coons heads about the size of my fist and as soon as his shoulders hit the side of this it's going to shut and that's going to give me probably a body catch you're going to get a lot less neck catches like I said then you do body catches anyway now I'm going to pull my way me up here forward to that again check my snare loop size again that's about right and I'm going to put this right in my whammy just like that and that is going to be my snare stand okay

so I'll back up into my trail where I'm going to put this and I'll put this exactly where I wanted the trail you see how easy that fell that snare dropped just from being bumped that's exactly what you want now you can manipulate this snare stand at this point - exactly the way you want it and you want that thing about see I use that false we're going to stand this up just a little bit just it's easy to manipulate these coat hangers that's what I really like about them is that they're so easy to manipulate if I put this right in the center of the trail and then block it off everywhere except where that snare loops at I've got some issues here with tree roots I'm dealing with here that's just part of the deal you just got to find a spot where the tree roots aren't out there we go now we can bring this up where we want it open it up put our whammy on there bend it just a little bit like that I like yet snare loop right there at the top just like that now what I want to do is I've got to connect the other end of this snare to something okay that's where those clips come in I've got a couple trees right here that are plenty capable of holding a coon or anything like that so if I just get my backpack and grab one of those speed clips I can put it on one end just like that wrap it around this tree clip it again and I'm ready to go now

now I'll set my snare to make sure it's exactly the way I want it get everything back out of the way off the trail just like that and I like my snare loop and I found it to be most effective if that thing's about twelve o'clock or maybe just a little bit beyond twelve o'clock and straight up and down mode so that when that animal comes through and touches it it drops right on that's what I want now what I'll do once I've got that set up I've got that where I want it and I've got to give myself a little room off the ground because remember the animals going to be standing so I want his head to go through here now I'm going to fence this thing off and the fencing is important because you want that able to go where you want them to you've got to fence this thing off in fencing doesn't have to be stuff necessarily that just it only has to be stuff he doesn't want to walk on you're not necessarily building a wall because you don't have to do that the animals going to take the path at least resistance if I just put a pile of sticks right here he's not going to walk around that pile of sticks as long as they go all the way to this tree he's going to walk in the path of least resistance which is right here and then I can do the same thing over here with sticks drop a couple sticks down right here

maybe sticking in the dirt a little bit and he's not going to try to go through that I don't want anything poking out anywhere toward the animal so just something like that is good enough and he's going to walk right around that stuff he's going to walk right through my snare now what I don't want to do is I don't want to catch a deer in here that's where the trips that comes in so now I'm going to take this stick here I'm going to put it about right here right above my snare and just bury it in the ground and I'll probably find some kind of a fork that I can lean it on right here if I can find one long enough that'll make it real simple if not I can wire it looks like there's a piece of vine I can use right here to latch that into and I can almost set it right on top of my snare it's not going to hurt anything if I do that all right now that animal is not going to walk here because it's not the path of least resistance he's not going to walk here it's not the path of least resistance he's not going to go over the stick again it's not the path of least resistance but a deer will step over this so I'm not going to catch a deer my target animal is a coon opossum a skunk something small easy to process quick to eat this is exactly what I want this is a good snare set up just like this okay guys I'm Dave Canberra at the Pathfinder school this has been a real quick primer into scenario there's a lot more that we need to discuss different setups different trails different ways to do things water sets more land sets things up in trees we'll talk about all of that this has just been a quick primer show you how to make a quick trail set with a coat hanger snare stand and how to utilize that snare set it up with the loop well good components you need on a snare how to use the Whammy and things of that nature like I said we do carry this type snare on a website for a reason because I think it's the best these type snares caught a lot of animals at the particular American trap College stay tuned on the end of this video and I'll put a slideshow of the animals that myself and my instructor Tony Daniel caught last week I appreciate you joining me for this video I appreciate your views I appreciate your support I thank you for everything you do for me for my family and for my school and I'll be back with another educational video in this trapping series as soon as I can listen Amasa to the end of the Douro there's a place us country fool go to have a good time locking hubs on a mud tire jumping rabbits through the barbed wire by the moonshine steam

like it should've been free and these days won't ever end reliving good