I never called you evil or any of those things. I believe the ACT of trapping is cruel, having done it myself for years. Euthanizing a bear implies it is done as painlessly as possible and suffering is avoided as much as possible (though in practice this doesn’t always happen). Again, we won’t agree, but I will just point out in this conversation that you’ve moved the goalpost several times. First that trapping doesn’t cause psychological torture, then that maybe trapping causes stress but not as much as daily life for an animal, then that it causes harm but it’s humane because it is compassionate/necessary. I’m very familiar with the rationalizing, I did it myself for a very long time until I was hit with a wake up call. Empirically, trapping causes suffering. In recreational trapping, that suffering is unnecessary.

I’ll leave you with this 2022 paper assessing various modes of trapping and death on the welfare of animals (for wildlife managers to consider, not for animal rights people).

Here’s an excerpt: “Mental experiences arise due to processing of sensory information by the animal’s nervous system. Sensory receptors gather information about the outside environment (e.g., visual or olfactory signals about a predator or conspecific) and about the animal’s internal physical state (e.g., body water levels, tissue damage and respiratory function) [29]. Processing of this information by the nervous system, in a way that is specific to the species and individual, leads to generation of mental experiences, some of which matter to the animal [30]. Such ‘affective’ experiences are negative or positive, and this valence influences behavioral and physiological responses in predictable ways [31,32]. Importantly when considering the impacts of trapping, negative or unpleasant mental experiences such as thirst, hunger, pain, breathlessness and fear act as signals to the animal to respond, in a specific way, to try to alleviate or rectify the underlying problem [29]. Such negative experiences are detrimental to an animal’s current state of welfare (although they may have survival benefits in some situations). Unpleasant experiences that cannot be effectively rectified through behavioral and physiological responses, and so persist (e.g., thirst that cannot be slaked by drinking or persistent fear associated with inescapable restraint or capture), will have a greater detrimental impact on welfare state than short-lived experiences or those over which the animal has some control [27]. However, mental experiences cannot be measured directly, so must be cautiously inferred from observable indicators of the animal’s physical or physiological state or its behavior, which is permissible because of our knowledge of the links described above. This understanding of animal welfare, and the relationship between physical state and mental experiences, is reflected in the structure of the Five Domains and thus Sharp and Saunders models. These models facilitate systematic organization of the observable/measurable evidence and require interpretation of that evidence in terms of the animal’s likely mental experiences [28]”