Ben Moyer: Fur war backfires on native wildlife in Pennsylvania

Unintended consequences. These often haunt human intentions. It’s likely outdoor people who value clean water, fish and wildlife, and public lands will be lamenting a lot of those in coming years, but this column is about an unintended – unimagined – consequence that’s already happening.

This one is on the people who, in their condemnation of trapping, and their persecution of anyone who has worn natural fur, quickened a native Pennsylvania wildlife species’ slide toward extinction, our own Allegheny woodrat.

I learned much on a recent excursion with Game Commission biologists working to prevent our few remaining Allegheny woodrat colonies from winking out of existence. Its conservation status here is Threatened, one step above Endangered.

The Allegheny woodrat is not the rat you’ll see in a trash heap, sewer, or neglected barn. Those are Norway rats that stowed-away in the holds of sailing ships bound to North America from Europe and have multiplied here around human habitations ever since.

The Allegheny woodrat is not even closely related. It’s slightly larger, with a densely furred tail instead of naked and scaly. Its eyes and ears are proportionally larger, and its face and snout are blunter, less pointed.

Native Allegheny woodrats live around rock ledges, outcrops and boulder-fields in remote parts of our plateaus and ridges where a Norway rat would never venture; life there is too hard.

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Allegheny woodrats evolved in close association with the American chestnut, which rained down enormous amounts of nutritious seeds every autumn. Since the chestnut’s demise from an invasive blight in the 1920s, woodrats have depended largely on acorns, which are less dependable than chestnuts. That erratic food supply is one reason for the woodrat’s century-long but steady decline.

As we clambered over boulders to reach a woodrat research site, the biologists explained a newer and expanding threat – infection of Allegheny woodrats by raccoon roundworm.

Raccoon roundworm is an intestinal parasite that does not harm raccoons. It lays its eggs in the raccoon’s intestines, from where the eggs are discharged in feces. If a raccoon leaves its scat near woodrat habitat, woodrats may investigate the scats and even hoard them in their nests, becoming infected with the roundworm parasite.

And raccoons have grown more numerous in recent years. “Increased raccoon populations and geographic range extension has been well documented,” stated a paper published in The Wildlife Society Bulletin.

Raccoon roundworm larvae invade the woodrat’s brain, causing neurological decline and death. Humans can also ingest the parasite, especially small children playing near a raccoon latrine site, then placing fingers in their mouths.

There are, admittedly, many contributors in woodrat decline including the gypsy moth, which reduces acorn production, habitat fragmentation, and declining genetic diversity resulting from isolation of populations from one another. But raccoon roundworm is one more quiet killer added to that mix, and its one that can infect woodrat populations still unaffected by other factors.

The biologists did not state that anti-trapping zeal had helped push the Allegheny woodrat toward extinction here, only that raccoons are a serious threat. But the connection is clear.

According to Game Commission furtaker surveys, the annual harvest of raccoons in Pennsylvania declined from 450,000 in 1983 to 74,000 in 2021.

An Illinois study linked plummeting fur prices to raccoon increase and harvest decline. “Annual harvest estimates had a negative trend and were highly correlated with pelt values. Thus, it appears the raccoon population in Illinois experienced an increase in abundance during a period of low pelt prices and harvest levels,” its authors wrote.

Here in Pennsylvania, before bobwhite quail were reintroduced to Letterkenny Army Depot, researchers studied the impact of trapping on raccoon (a known quail nest predator) numbers. They placed trail cameras in two different study zones and tallied the raccoon “hits” on camera. Local trappers were invited to trap one zone for raccoons. They eliminated 116 raccoons from the trapped zone over a two-year period.

“Frequencies of raccoon detections decreased in the managed quail habitat areas (trapped) and increased in the unmanaged control area after every trapping season,” states

the study’s discussion. “There is compelling evidence that trapping efforts decreased raccoon populations in the managed quail habitat area, therefore trapping efforts should continue.”

Trapping fur has a long history in North America. Its participants must know the habits of wild creatures intimately. They must take tough conditions and hard work in stride. Its persecution in modern society is another symptom of our deepening isolation from the natural world.

By shaming people for wearing natural fur, quashing the market for fur and driving down pelt price, zealots bent on preventing perceived cruelty to abundant, adaptable, renewable furbearers like raccoon, beaver, and coyote unwittingly jeopardized other native wildlife, especially the Allegheny woodrat, an icon species of our geographic region, whose existence they probably were not even aware of. Unintended consequence.