It's a trap! Animal traps on Trade Me

We’re a bird loving country.

We take pride in our ornithological diversity, love to hear the dawn chorus, and feel a flutter when we hear the flap of wings from a fantail, kereru or kaka.

They’re a mark of our special place in the world, and we’ve spent a lot of time over the years as a country helping protect our birdlife.

A part of this is animal trapping. Many introduced species pose a risk to the bird folk and their young, and setting traps has proved a good way to help control this threat.

However, there is always a right and a not-so-right way to go about things and this is reflected in what can and can’t be listed on Trade Me.

What traps can’t be listed:

There are a lot of traps out there. Traps you can buy at your local hardware store should be fine – it’ll be the traps that you’ve found at the back of the barn that we’re concerned about.

Over time, what is acceptable for trapping has changed and some older traps are considered inhumane.

• On Trade Me, you may not list hard-jawed, leg hold traps – these kinds of traps can break and maim an animal and leave it in all sorts of pain. This is in line with legislation around the use of such devices: no hard-jawed, leg hold trap may be used in a residential environment.

• Glue traps for rats are also unable to be listed as they can only be used by commercial pest operators – the small cockroach glue traps are fine though.

These types of traps can’t tell the difference between a possum and your neighbour’s poodle, so to stop unfortunate accidents and to give members clear guidelines to follow, we’ve taken the step to ban all hard-jawed, leg hold traps and glue traps for rats.

OK, but what do these traps look like?

These traps look like the old-time gin-traps, although many can be smaller.

However, the best way to identify a trap that cannot be listed is just to have a look at what it does – if there is a plate trigger that could be activated by a foot, and the jaws are metal, then it won’t be able to be listed.

The size of the trap and whether the trap has teeth or not is not a factor – we'll have to pull it off the site.

Please note that you cannot modify a hard-jawed trap to make it soft-jawed.

If you’d like to know the ins-and-outs of the Government's stance on these traps, or would like to know more about identifying traps or trapping in general, we recommend getting in touch with either the Department of Conservation or the Ministry of Primary Industries – they have a lot of helpful information on their websites.

If you come across any other listings you have concerns about, please report them to us via the "Community Watch" link at the bottom of the page. This will bring them to the attention of our policing team who will investigate.

With the above, we hope that we can help keep the pests out of your garden, off the farm and away from our birds – without causing unnecessary risk or harm to other animals.

Creative Commons image used courtesy Wendy House on Flickr.