by Martha Burdick

“Non-target species” is how trapping literature might refer to them.

Others would call them Timber. Merlin. Freckles. Jingles. They are four dogs who, one way or another, ended up in traps. Traps that were not intended for them.

All four stories are scary, and sad. But Timber and Rachel Wiecking’s story is the saddest.

Rachel Wiecking lives in Portland, Oregon now. In 1998 she lived in Indianola, Washington on the Olympic Peninsula. Many people walked with their dogs on the town’s public beach. She and Timber walked there too, almost every day. Their usual route took them by one house in particular that was just a few steps off the beach. One day, another walker waved at her: look out, he said, there are traps at that house. Alarmed, Wiecking told herself they wouldn’t take that route again. Their next walk was two days after Christmas, 1998. They neared the beach. Suddenly, Timber took off. Wiecking would never see her alive again.

The 2 ½-year-old shepherd-lab had gone under the house that was so near the beach. Conibear traps had been set there to, as it turned out, catch river otters. The otters, the house’s summer residents complained, left a bad smell.

Conibear traps are sometimes called ‘body-grip’ traps; they “are not designed to maintain an animal alive,” according to website information for trappers posted by the U.S. Geological Society. “Extreme care and discretion should be used when setting these traps on land to avoid any contact with pets or non-target land-dwelling animals.”

There were no fences at that house near the beach. There were no signs. And now the young dog Wiecking had adopted from a pound some 18 months before was dead.

Wiecking was devastated, and wracked with remorse.

“I feel incredibly stupid now,” she said. She was also appalled, and other people in town were outraged by Timber’s death and by the otter trapping. She’d often seen other dogs and children in the area under the house where the traps lay in wait: “it so easily could have been a kid.”

She wrote to the residents of the house, asking that they remove the traps. The traps were removed.

But Timber was gone. In the past she had made it through some hard times; first the pound, then being hit by a car. Terrified by a storm, she had broken free and run into the road. Surgery repaired her leg, and she was back on track. Back on track until that day, two days after Christmas.

Wiecking is now a student. She doesn’t have a dog. She doesn’t have the time one would need. But her memories of Timber, and the shock of Timber’s death, are alive.

“I couldn’t fathom the possibility that people would set traps so close to a public beach,” she said. “I guess I was too trusting. I guess I just feel a little more cynical now.”

Lisa Parsons encountered a trap this winter. She had harnessed her sled dogs up one January day for a training run on an old logging road in southeast King County, a mile or so from the Icicle Creek Hatchery.

Suddenly, Merlin, a 2-year-old Inuit-Husky mix, was caught up in a live trap. The trap was in the middle of the road. “I could have stepped in it,” Parsons said. Merlin wasn’t injured because the live trap’s claws didn’t dig into the flesh; lucky, because an injury almost certainly would have stymied the running that sled dogs need. The trap, which had probably been set for bobcat or coyote, was on private land without the landowner’s permission; it lacked the required trapper identification and was illegal, Parsons said.

She’s heard stories of other dogs having nasty encounters with traps. She heard about another sled dog racer whose dog was caught in a bear trap. And the Fish and Wildlife officer she reported her encounter to had first-hand information as well: his dog had stepped into a trap, too.

Parsons still runs her four dogs some five days a week, but now she seeks out areas frequented by equestrians and other dogs, areas she hopes are less likely to attract trappers. “But” she said, “there’s no guarantee.”

Two traps in Seabeck (on the Olympic Peninsula) nearly stopped Jolyn Meriam’s heart, and truly changed her life.

It was a good day for a hike, a day some 10 years ago that seems like yesterday to Meriam. She and her sister set off for a hike with their several dogs over old logging roads through Department of Natural Resources land near Silverdale. She knew that other walkers frequented that area; she didn’t know that trappers used it too.

The walk started out well. But within a few minutes, Freckles, a cocker mix, was in deep trouble.

“I just remember hearing the most horrific screaming,” Meriam said. The dog was caught in a conibear trap just five or ten feet off the trail. The dog was slowly strangling, and screaming.

Somehow, the two women managed to free the dog. “I said to my sister, ‘everything’s fine, let’s go on’,” Meriam said.

A few moments later, they heard another scream.

This time, it was Jingles, the Springer spaniel, caught in a steel-jaw trap. Meriam’s sister had read up on traps. She freed the terrified dog.

The dogs escaped injury, but only because she and her sister were nearby, Meriam said. It was legal for the traps to be where they were but not legal for the trapper to place them without warning signs, Meriam said. The trapper later told her he didn’t post signs because the traps could be stolen. But signs would do little for endangered species, or birds, or animals unguarded by a caring human, she said.

News of the incident reached Mitchell Fox, former PAWS Advocacy Director, who asked her to testify in Olympia about trapping legislation. She did. She continues her work today collecting signatures on Bainbridge Island, where she lives, and Kitsap County for Initiative 713.

People have asked her why the dogs were off leash. “It wouldn’t happen again,” Meriam said. The danger to the dogs and to the wildlife they chase is too great.

Freckles and Jingles went on to live “long, good lives” and have since died of old age. Meriam now has two other dogs, both rescues, and “I do not let them far from me.”