PROFILE Young trapper carries on tradition

His love for the outdoors cannot be suppressed.
By DON SAPATKIN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
PHILADELPHIA -- Jake Klaassen caught his first red fox the day before Thanksgiving.
"I felt like I was on top of the world. I was so happy," said Klaassen, 18, struggling to put into words the thrill that others might associate with a 10K race, or a hole in one, or a first kiss.
He knows that most people can't relate to trapping, and that some will hate him for doing it. Concerned about activists, along with competition from other trappers, he asked that his location be identified only as the "Amish country" west of Philadelphia.
But his love for the outdoors cannot be suppressed. He fishes, hunts, traps, canoes. He dreams of becoming a conservation officer.
"I've never owned a video game in my life," he said. "I've never owned a computer, and I don't watch much TV.
"I'm outside."
On a recent Saturday, with wind gusts making 30 degrees feel like 20, Klaassen sloshed up an Amish farmer's shallow stream looking for submerged muskrat holes. Nearly invisible to the untrained eye, he spotted one after another along 200 yards.
Rat stature
Muskrats look like small beavers. Their propensity to reproduce in large numbers, eat a range of vegetation and burrow into dikes gives them a stature among farmers not unlike the way rats are viewed in big cities.
Klaassen pointed to a tunnel entrance partly above the surface. "There's only a couple of inches of water going into that hole so I'll set a foot trap there."
He drew a weathered chain of odd steel pieces from a woven basket, and cast around for the right rock to anchor the trap near the opening. Then he pulled back the spring and set it on the bottom.
For muskrat, placement of the trap -- either foothold or a body-gripping type -- is everything; no lure or bait needed.
A muskrat walking along the stream bottom toward the burrow steps on the trigger pan. Jaws snap shut around its foot or body. Death is by drowning.
Klaassen set eight muskrat traps on this Saturday afternoon, plus two larger foothold traps for mink or raccoon. Early Sunday, the larger traps were empty but he had six muskrats.
"You've got to keep them in check," said the Amish farmer, who raises corn, alfalfa, soybeans and heifers on 61 acres around the stream. Another farm's pond was drained when muskrats burrowed through the dam. He wished more youth would take up trapping.
Klaassen's graduating class last spring was stocked with sportsmen-to-be. He guessed that half of them hunted and 75 percent fished. He was the one trapper.
At about $2.50 per muskrat, trapping doesn't pay much anymore. It's a lot of work. It's also a source of pride.
Three weeks ago, on another farm where a fence, a drainage ditch and a tractor path meet, Klaassen dug a small hole five inches down at a 45-degree angle. He placed bait inside, scent outside, and a foothold trap covered with dirt two inches away.
This farmer had fox dens in summer. Foxes eat everything from chickens to an occasional cat. They also dig holes at an angle to bury food or waste.
Homework
Klaassen had done his homework. He found a fox track the first morning, a snapped trap the second. The third day, he discovered a "really nice fox" -- very red, no silver -- around 7:30 a.m., and dispatched it quickly with a .22 rifle.
Last season, Klaassen and his father together got roughly 15 raccoon, 325 muskrat, 25 opossum, two mink and 24 beaver. Far from tired, he is inspired by the trapping life.
"It's a dying tradition," he said. "And it shouldn't be."
Earnest, patient and passionate, he is perplexed by those who argue trapping is wrong.
"They say it's cruelty to animals, but we're helping the animals," he said -- preventing population densities that could lead to sickness and starvation. "We're keeping them in check, taking care of them quickly."
With trapping deep in his family's heritage, Klaassen began tagging along with his father as soon as he could walk the streambanks. By age 10, he had a line of traps. By sixth grade, he was honing a case in "persuasive" school reports for a teacher he knew would disagree.
She called him in at the end of the year.
"She said, 'I'm still going to be a vegetarian. But I see why people hunt and trap now.'"
He was on top of the world.