Wild coyotes are caught in loophole or leghold traps. The traps are set up where the animals are the most likely to pass by or on game trails. If an animal triggers a trap, it is clamped into it painfully. Not rarely do the tramps jam down on body parts that are particularly sensitive to pain, such as the snout or the eye area. Confused, in agony and fear, the animals try desperately to free themselves from the trap, thereby dislocating their joints and injuring themselves gravely. In order to free themselves, they sometimes bite off their own limbs. If an animal is able to free itself from a trap, then it hardly stands a chance of surviving in the wild and will perish slowly from an infection, starve to death or become easy prey for other predators. Given the endless expanse of the hunting territories in North America and Canada, the traps are not checked by the trappers for several days, which prolongs the suffering of the animals additionally.

An additional problem lies in the fact that undesired animal species are caught in the traps and considered to be „by-catch“, amongst them, protected wild animals as well as pets such as dogs and cats.

The trapping of fur animals is to be refused on grounds of animal welfare. This has nothing to do with controlled hunting and does not contribute to controlling populations within the sense of intelligent wildlife management, as the fur industry likes to claim. The fact alone that traps are used for hunting, contradicts these statements – trapping targets animals haphazardly and therefore has nothing to do with wildlife management. Annually, approx. 100,000 coyotes are caught because of the demand for their fur and not out of any biological-ecological necessity.