If so, don't do anything.
If you don't favor mandatory trap registration in Nevada, then you can AND SHOULD do something immediately. Last week the Assembly considered SB4, which would implement the mandatory trap registration legislation enacted last session as SB 213. However, Assemblyman Ira Hansen introduced an amendment last week that changed the wording of the legislation from "must register traps" to "may register traps." This amendment is now being considered by the Assembly. The antis are engaged in a furious letter writing campaign. They realize that after three years of legislative hearings, NDOW meetings, CAB meetings, and Wildlife Commission hearings, about the only thing they really ever achieved was mandatory trap registration . . . now they are set to lose EVERYTHING they have worked so hard to achieve in depriving trappers of their rights.
I urge you to write to your Assemblyman and ask them to VOTE IN FAVOR OF SB4 AS AMENDED. Here is a letter I just wrote:
Dear Nevada Assembly:
I fully support the recent amendment of SB4 provided by Assemblyman Hansen last week. I applaud Assemblyman Hansen for his common sense approach to this legislation.
Decades ago, the legislature required trappers to register their traps – as an effort to assist trappers and law enforcement in identifying traps that may have been stolen. However, that alleged benefit never occurred. Certainly it never benefitted trappers as the Nevada Department of Wildlife ("NDOW") has never successfully prosecuted a single trap thief using this method.
Later, the requirement to register traps was dropped (although trappers could of course voluntarily register their traps), and the results were the same – no trap thief has ever been successfully prosecuted by NDOW using trap registration. I should know. Three years ago I had traps stolen and had placed trail cameras at the scene. I had color video footage of the thief in the act of stealing my traps. Although NDOW investigated the crime, it never prosecuted the thief.
Trap registration is a solution in search of a problem. It does absolutely no good whatsoever. It doesn’t assist law enforcement, and it certainly doesn’t assist trappers. Rather, it imposes a useless, expensive and labor intensive requirement upon trappers to permanently stamp a registration number into the body of the trap. The registration system concept purports to give a registration number to each trapper that he or she would place on every trap – there is no number unique to the trap, like a serial number. Therefore, the system is really trapper registration, not trap registration, since it only registers trappers and not their traps. To create a true trap registration system would require hundreds of thousands of dollars to catalogue the hundreds of thousands of traps currently in Nevada, record them, track them, and identify them (just like the DMV system). And what happens when I sell or trade a trap to someone else? The law requires my trap to be marked “permanently” with the registration number. How can I sell or transfer my traps with a permanent number on them?
This trap registration requirement is a prime example of government control run amuck. It was a huge waste of time and money when it was previously required, and did absolutely no good whatsoever. Now this legislature is considering repeating the mistakes of the past? Thanks to Assemblyman Hansen for amending this bill to make the registration requirement optional instead of mandatory. I applaud his efforts and urge every Assembly member to show the same good judgment and adopt SB 4 as currently amended.
Thank you.
Tracy Truman
Las Vegas, Nevada
You can send it to your individual Assembly representative, or you can send it to the general mail box and ask that it be distributed to all Assembly members:
assembly@asm.state.nv.us
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