Should Hoosiers be allowed to trap river otters for their fur?

Trapping for the fur trade helped kill off all of Indiana's river otters by the 1940s.

But thanks to recent efforts to reintroduce the animals in Indiana, otters have rebounded to the point where wildlife officials are proposing doing the very thing that contributed to their demise: trapping them.

This time around, though, state wildlife officials say they're planning to set stringent bag limits and establish monitoring programs to make sure the otters thrive, while also giving wildlife managers a key tool they say is needed to keep the species from becoming a nuisance.

A proposal that would open a season on river otters also would provide Indiana's rural trapping community with a new quarry, one whose pelts fetch around $80 apiece.

The public can comment on the proposal that would open the river otter trapping season as early as next year at a Natural Resources Commission hearing scheduled for Dec. 11 in Plainfield.

The commissioners are likely to get an earful from animal rights activists who are appalled at the very notion of any animal being killed for its fur, let alone one known for being so gregarious and playful.

"We thought introducing them was a good idea," said Joel Kerr, executive director of the Indiana Animal Rights Alliance. "Now it's not, so we're going to kill a bunch of them. That's the way people think, and it's wrong."

Wildlife officials and trapping groups counter that that's an overly simplistic way of viewing the issue.

Unregulated trapping and habitat loss had wiped out so many otters that they were listed as a protected species in 1921, but it was too late.

By 1942, otters had disappeared from the state, as they had from much of the country.

In 1995, the Department of Natural Resources, with the help of trapping groups, began releasing otters back into the state.

Over the next five years, 303 were transported from Louisiana and released at 12 Indiana sites. The animals' range has vastly expanded since then.

"We know they now occupy over 80 percent of counties," said Linnea Petercheff, a spokeswoman with the DNR's Division of Fish and Wildlife. "They have really spread throughout the state."

The river otter was removed from Indiana's endangered species list in 2005.

Petercheff said the otters' expansion has been accompanied by increasing conflicts with their human neighbors. The animals have moved from river bottoms and swamps to backyard ponds and commercial fish hatcheries, where they gobble up expensive captive prey.

In 2013, DNR officials received 86 complaints about otters eating fish from private fishing ponds and hatcheries, a 25 percent increase from the year before, Petercheff said.

"We've also doubled the number of nuisance control permits that we've issued over the last couple of years," she said.

With complaints growing along with the otter population, the Natural Resources Commission, the governing body that sets state fish and wildlife policy, is proposing opening an annual otter trapping season next year that would run from Nov. 15 to March 15.

All neighboring states already have an otter trapping season, Petercheff said.

Trappers could take only two otters a year and would have to report their kills to state wildlife officials within a day. DNR officials also would set a statewide quota for otters.

Petercheff said that when the quota is hit, the season would be halted. Trapping would be allowed only in counties where the otter population is plentiful.

For the time being, she said, that probably wouldn't include Central Indiana, where otters haven't made as big of a comeback.

There are about 5,500 licensed resident trappers in Indiana. It's legal to trap beavers, coyotes, foxes, weasels, minks, muskrats, opossums, raccoons and skunks.

Fred Philips, president of the Indiana State Trappers Association, said modern trappers learned from the mistakes of the past and were instrumental in bringing the species back from the brink. He said he remembers selling T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan "There otter be otters" to raise funds for Indiana's reintroduction efforts.

"We sold thousands of them," said Philips, a practicing veterinarian.

Philips said trappers support regulations that allow them to play an important role in modern wildlife management: that of large predators that are no longer a part of Indiana's landscape.

"Unless we want to bring back wolves and bears and let nature literally take care of itself — in which case there's going to be high highs, and then disease comes in and then you get low lows — there's just no other way to deal with the species effectively without trapping," Philips said.

Of course, others are likely to disagree.

To weigh in in person, you can attend the Natural Resources Commission's hearing at 5:30 p.m. Dec. 11 at the Plainfield Public Library, 1120 Stafford Road.

Comments also can be submitted online at http://www.in.gov/nrc/2377.htm.

Call Star reporter Ryan Sabalow at (317) 444-6179. Follow him on Twitter: @RyanSabalow.