Trapping Practices. Bans Use of Specified Traps and Animal Poisons. Initiative Statute.
	Argument in Favor of Proposition 4

A "YES" vote on Proposition 4 WILL PROTECT WILDLIFE AND FAMILY PETS:

• by banning cruel and indiscriminate traps--including the barbaric steel-jawed leghold trap, snares and Conibears--for recreation or the fur trade;
• by banning two especially dangerous poisons that harm animals and the environment--Compound 1080 and sodium cyanide.

Commercial trappers use cruel traps to catch and kill tens of thousands of animals for the fur trade--24,136 during the 1997-98 trapping season according to State of California figures. Bobcats, beavers, foxes and other furbearers are intentional targets of trappers because of prices their pelts bring.

Thousands of other animals including family pets, endangered species, birds, and small mammals also suffer and die in indiscriminate leghold traps, snares and Conibear traps.

Still legal in California, the steel-jawed leghold trap is condemned as "INHUMANE" by the American Veterinary Medical Association, World Veterinary Association, and American Animal Hospital Association, and is banned in more than 80 countries--and several states.

The notorious steel-jawed leghold trap and other body-gripping traps catch animals by slamming shut with bone-crushing force on an animal's leg or other body part causing injury and prolonged suffering until death.

Proposition 4 WILL ALLOW the use of traps and other wildlife management techniques:

• to protect human health and safety
• to protect property, levees and canals
• to protect endangered wildlife
• to protect crops and livestock

Endorsed by the Sierra Club, Proposition 4 is sponsored by the ASPCA, Animal Protection Institute, The Ark Trust Inc., Doris Day Animal League, The Fund for Animals, The Humane Society of the United States, and The International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Other endorsers include scores of environmental and animal protection organizations--Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides, Mendocino Coast Audubon Society, Mountain Lion Foundation, State Humane Officers, Rescue K-9s of America, spcaLA, and the Orange County, Almanor, Sequoia, Golden State, North County, Northwest, Marin, Peninsula, Glendale, and Pasadena humane societies.

A YES vote will end the senseless cruelty of traps and poisons.

• Traps and poisons are indiscriminate, they harm or kill any animal that triggers them.
• A trapped animal will attempt to chew off its own leg to escape.
• Wildlife should not be killed for fashion.
• Poisoned animals suffer violently, sometimes for hours, before dying in agony.
• Secondary deaths result when other animals feed on poison victims.
• There are humane alternatives, including cage traps, when animals must be caught.

The California Department of Fish and Game acknowledged in a 2/3/98 environmental document: "The use of cage traps would eliminate most, if not all, of the negative impacts of trapping as far as injury and capture of nontarget species are concerned . . . Threatened, endangered, and protected species, as well as pets, could be released relatively unharmed from cage traps. Any danger to humans would be eliminated . . . The department does not expect that any significant adverse impacts would occur if this alternative (allowing only cage traps) was adopted."

PLEASE PROTECT PETS AND WILDLIFE FROM CRUEL TRAPS AND POISONS by voting YES on Proposition 4.

DORIS DAY
President, Doris Day Animal League HONORABLE WILLIAM A. NEWSOM
Justice (Ret.), California Court of Appeal ELDEN HUGHES
Vice President for Communications, Sierra Club, 1996-1997