By Ben Neary
NMWF Conservation Director
SANTA FE — New Mexico would limit trapping on public lands near the state’s biggest cities and near established trailheads under a proposed rule the state game commission began considering Thursday.
The commission hearing at the State Capitol in Santa Fe was the first of several the commission must hold before it takes final action on any change to its trapping rule.
The proposed changes come just months after the New Mexico Legislature gave serious consideration to banning trapping outright.
Much of the support for passing a trapping ban in this year’s spring legislative session came as a result of public outrage about pets caught in illegal, unregistered traps near trails and dwellings. Several groups that support the proposal have pledged to continue to push to outlaw trapping.
Several people who testified Thursday denounced trapping as a cruel relic of a bygone era. On the other side, a few trappers said they rely on the practice both for income as well as to keep predators in check to protect livestock.
Stewart Liley, head biologist for the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, told commissioners the agency plans public meetings on the proposed rule changes this fall. The game commission could vote on a final rule by January.
Liley said trapping is the most efficient and effective method to manage furbearers. He said it’s used by researchers, wildlife managers and the general public and said the practice is both highly regulated and guided by international standards.
Many furbearers such as raccoons are increasingly present in urban areas and Liley said conflicts have been increasing lately.
“I would argue that furbearer management and trapping comport with the North American Model of Wildlife Management,” Liley said, noting that the practice is endorsed by professional game management groups including the Wildlife Society and the American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians.
Speaking of high-profile cases involving pets caught in illegal traps, Liley said, “It’s no different from someone who goes out in the middle of the night with a spotlight and kills a deer and cuts its head off. We don’t call that a hunter; that’s a poacher.”
The proposed changes the game department is recommending include requiring trappers to complete mandatory, online education courses that would include instruction on animal identification.
Also under the proposed rule, traps would be prohibited on the Sandia Ranger District near Albuquerque, the eastern portion of the Organ Mountain Desert Peaks National Monument near Las Cruces and within one-half mile of the road to the Santa Fe ski basin and the Taos ski valley.
The proposal also would ban traps within one-half mile of designated trailheads, campgrounds, rest areas, picnic areas, boat-launching areas and dwellings without the owner’s permission.
The proposal sets a number of technical specifications for allowable traps and specifies that trappers would be required to report any Mexican Gray Wolf they captured. Liley said trapping has had the benefit of allowing game managers to learn about wolf packs in places where they hadn’t known they existed.
Under a separate rule change, Liley said the department proposes to roll back a policy that allows sport-trapping of mountain lions. Trapping of them would still be allowed to protect bighorn sheep, livestock and for other game management purposes.
Commissioner Roberta Salazar Henry of Las Cruces said the people she’s met who are trapping are extremely ethical and knowledgeable.
Commissioner Jeremy Vesbach said trapping has been a polarizing issue in the state for a long time, with neither proponents nor opponents willing to give an inch. He said he sees the proposed rule change as a new, collaborative approach.
Vesbach said he would like to see the game department do its best to catch people setting illegal traps.
During public comments, veterinarian Carolyn Fletcher said she has treated both pets and wildlife that have been caught in traps. She said she’s treated fractures and degloving injuries.
“The traps are indiscriminate,” Fletcher said, adding that they can catch all sorts of animals, including threatened and endangered species.
Jessica Johnson with Animal Protection of New Mexico told the commission her group has received over 100 reports of negative trapping incidents over the past several years, including both residents and tourists reporting injury to pets.
“We’ve seen both on-leash and off-leash dogs captured by traps,” Johnson said.
Trapper Tom Fisher of Tierra Amarilla said he teaches trapper education.
“You should use a lot of caution before you restrict coyotes and lethal control,” Fisher said, adding that coyotes recognize trap-free areas and will concentrate in them.
In other action, lawyer John Grubesic of the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office told the commission he wants to conduct more legal research before the commission enforces a 90-day moratorium it enacted last month on allowing any more landowners to enlist the game department to certify that rivers and streams that cross their properties are closed to public entry.
The game commission last month voted to block the game department from certifying more waters in the state as “non-navigable.” The previous game commission last year approved five such certifications, purporting to require members of the public to get written permission from landowners before they may boat or fish or otherwise use the waterways.
The New Mexico Wildlife Federation wrote Mike Sloane, director of the game department, and members of the game commission last month asking them to roll back the certification program.
In its request, the NMWF letter cited a 1945 ruling by the New Mexico Supreme Court, as well as subsequent state attorneys general opinions, that all concluded the public may fish, float or otherwise use streams and streambeds where they run through private property as long as the public doesn’t trespass across private land to access the waters, or trespass from the stream onto private land. It doesn’t matter whether the waterways are navigable, they concluded.
“It would be my recommendation that the department not enforce the moratorium until I have an opportunity to conduct more research into the stream access issue,” Grubesic said.
Sloane last month asked the AG’s Office for a formal legal opinion whether the rule the previous commission adopted is constitutional. That opinion hasn’t been completed yet.
Commission Chair Joanna Prukop said that because the stream access issue wasn’t on the agenda that the commission wouldn’t act on it but would take it up at a future meeting.
The commission took testimony about the steam access issue Thursday. Several landowners from the Terrero area, on the Pecos River, said they oppose the notion of people fishing the river where it runs through their property. They urged the commission not to let it happen.
Steve Henry, a member of the board of the NMWF, told the commission, “I think people have a misunderstanding that this will be decided by the commission.” Instead, he said it’s already been decided by the New Mexico Supreme Court.
John Crenshaw, president of the board of the NMWF, told the commission that the group and several other conservation groups support the action the commission took enacting the moratorium. He noted that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has said that agencies in her administration will be guided by following the law.
Belarmino Archuleta, a member of the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant, said he supports allowing the public to fish the rivers in the state. He noted some people have fenced off segments of the Chama River.
“As long as these are public waters, these are waters in the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant, people should have a right to fish it,” Archuleta said.
The commission heard an update on the proposal to transfer the Laguna del Campo, also called Burns Lake, to the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant. The Legislature this year passed a joint resolution authorizing the commission to transfer 22.4 acres to the grant.
Kirk Patten of the department’s fisheries division told commissioners that he and Sloane have been meeting with land grant officials and also with representatives of a local ditch that carries water that feeds the lake to address the land transfer issue.
Prukop, said the commission is committed to resolving the transfer issue to everyone’s satisfaction and said the commission plans to act on the transfer once all legal issues are resolved. The lake will remain open to public fishing after the transfer, officials say.
Steve Polaco, president of the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant, told the commission his members are eager to complete the transfer. “We are eager to move on, so that we can have our little jewel,” he said of the lake.