Governor Dodge State Park · Our Response

Our Answer to the Man Who Organized the DNR’s Raccoon Killing Class

This weekend the Wisconsin DNR ran a “Learn to Hunt & Trap Raccoons” class for kids at Governor Dodge State Park. No trapper education, no hunter education, no park sticker. When we spoke up, the organizer came at us with trapping talk. I wanted to share our full response with you, because it lays out the science, the ethics, and the law in one place.

Our Response

I’ve dealt with plenty of raccoons caught incidentally in body grips set for beaver and muskrat. I’m sure you’re using dog-proof cylinder traps, 1.5 coils, or maybe cage traps. It doesn’t change the cruelty.

I know firsthand the injury, pain, and swelling a foothold causes. You aren’t there for the first hour or two, when a trapped raccoon pulls, bites, and exhausts itself, because being cornered is the worst thing a wild animal can experience. Plenty of raccoon trappers use submersion sets, where the trap drags the animal underwater until it drowns. Traps sit overnight. I’ve come up on trapped raccoons attacked by a predator or another raccoon. I’ve watched six-month-old kits run circles around their mother while she was stuck.

In state parks, trappers have to use dog-proof traps on land, but those still catch other wildlife. Any other trap is allowed as long as it’s set underwater.

Off-leash hounds don’t belong in our state parks either. When a raccoon is shot out of a tree, it’s rarely dead when it hits the ground, and I’ve never seen coon hunters tie up their dogs first.

I’ve never argued raccoons can’t be a problem in parks. They steal food and open coolers, and sometimes lethal removal is needed. But raccoons exist where there’s food. They won’t forage wild food when there are marshmallows. Park visitors who feed wildlife are part of the problem, and so are people putting out bait, which is exactly what this class teaches.

Look at bears. Stable isotope testing of Wisconsin bear tissue by the DNR and UW–Madison found bait makes up more than 40% of their diet, more than Yosemite’s food-conditioned bears. We’ve changed what wild animals eat on a molecular level. That isn’t conservation.

Raccoons are lazy and don’t travel far when food is easy. Research in northern Illinois found raccoons living near human food had home ranges of roughly 50 to 130 acres, much smaller and more stable than rural raccoons’. A raccoon raiding the campground lives at the campground. Every state park already bans trapping within 100 yards of trails, campgrounds, and picnic areas, which pushes trappers into the remote corners of the park. Those remote corners are exactly where raccoons belong, and those raccoons have nothing to do with the campground problem.

Fix the food and you fix the conflict. Require campers to use secure food boxes, or provide them like we do in bear range. Fine people caught feeding wildlife. We’ll always have lots of raccoons in Wisconsin because we have corn, bait, cat food, and trash everywhere, and lethal removal won’t change that. I haven’t seen a single study showing raccoons are overpopulated at Governor Dodge. There are only six nuisance raccoon reports at the campground.

Raccoons get blamed for a lot that people cause. Research on endangered piping plovers found that winter beaches with more human disturbance had lower plover survival, and a Florida study found plovers fled dogs at greater distances than they fled raccoons and other predators.

I did wildlife conflict work for years. Eviction and removing food sources work almost every time. If you evict a mother raccoon from an attic and don’t fix the entry point, another mother moves in next year. Killing her does nothing. Repairing the hole solves it. Coexistence works better.

This program is part of the DNR’s R3 effort to recruit hunters. Out of more than 700 R3 programs nationwide, only about 20 were found to actually recruit, retain, or reactivate hunters. Even the Wildlife Management Institute found youth-focused R3 events are generally less effective.

It isn’t about food or money either. Outside of Delafield and a few places in the South, hardly anyone eats raccoon, and I don’t see a lot of Davy Crocketts running around in coonskin caps. The fur market for raccoons and coyotes is dead. Supervised kids under 16 trap free, a first-time trapping license is $5, and a mentored license is $10. So what is this for?

I’m not anti-hunting or anti-trapping. Wisconsin’s constitution protects the right to hunt, fish, and trap, subject to reasonable regulation. Keeping trapping and hounding out of the busiest park in southern Wisconsin is reasonable regulation, and Wisconsin already does it. Governor Nelson, Lakeshore, Heritage Hill, Copper Culture, and Lost Dauphin state parks ban hunting and trapping entirely. Peninsula and High Cliff allow archery hunting only. Governor Dodge should be treated the same way.

About 20 million people visit Wisconsin state parks every year. Wisconsin sells around 22,000 trapping licenses, and the DNR itself says far fewer of those people actually trap. There’s plenty of other public and private land for this.

Since I spoke up, I’ve gotten about ten more messages. None argued science or ethics. They sent pictures of dead animals and called me names. One said someone should trap me and leave me in a box for days.

Most people don’t know how rarely cruelty to wildlife gets charged in Wisconsin. Even poaching usually gets treated as a game violation, not cruelty. Look at Fond du Lac: a woman and three teenage boys shot more than 100 deer, left most to rot, and drove around with a wounded deer suffering in the trunk taking selfies. The boys got community service. The woman got 30 days in jail, a $1,000 fine, and her licenses back in three years.

You change the language on everything: harvest, dispatch, foothold, cable restraint, management. I’m happy to use your words. They don’t change what happens to the raccoon.

I’d respect it if people just said, “We enjoy trapping and hounding, and we think state parks should be open to us too.” But don’t bring the old colonial attitude that the only way to manage anything is to kill it. That’s lazy.

Science doesn’t tell us what we should do. Ethics does. The public doesn’t want non-offending raccoons trapped, hounded, and killed in a busy state park by kids with no trapper education, no hunter education, and no park sticker. With a whole state to trap in, why can’t you leave one busy state park alone?

Melissa Smith
Executive Director & Founder
Great Lakes Wildlife Alliance · Friends of the Wisconsin Wolf & Wildlife
msmith@wiwolvesandwildlife.org · (608) 234-8860
speakforwildlife.org