Very difficult to HOLD a coon by a foot in a bodygripper. I can think of only a half dozen times in over 60 years use of body grippers(bought my first 120s in 1958) when I have held one even though I have had hold of dozens. And the destruction is just amazing! I once had what was likely a big coon in a 220 inside a barn. When I arrived my empty trap was hanging from a ceiling beam and a whole lot of that barn and its contents had toothmarks. To get a BIG coons head into a body gripper consistently, the container must be deep, a 6 or 7 gallon bucket is about right, bait wired in top back and an elevated mouth also increases catch rates. Coon have long legs and big ones do not like to lie on their belly to crawl into a box or bucket. They mostly just refuse.
Skunk are considerably smaller than coon on average here but ours in the Dakotas are not little like in some other places. They are easy to catch but I do not like to foot catch them because they are difficult to dispatch without spray. I have taken several thousand skunk in my nearly 70 years trapping and have tried many methods, including the pans on bodygrippers as mentioned above and I eventually concluded that cage traps are by far the best FOR MY purposes where I want all the essence as well as an undamaged pelt. I have seen before where you said that you really liked pans on bodygrippers and in much more limited experience than yours, I found that they work fine for fisher when many of my trigger positions again resulted in hip caught animals. I have tried boxes similar to yours for mink and have caught some with circle triggers BUT I found that i could not set them until it was deep cold/ snow and ice etc in order to avoid catching coon by a front foot.
Last edited by cohunt; 12/02/20 07:37 PM.