Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Overwhelmed by river otters

Both my ponds have been stripped multiple times by river otters. Discouraging, to say the least. There is a city of Fayetteville, Arkansas, owned protected otter haven, called Lake Sequoyah, just a few miles downstream from my ponds, plus the ponds are only about 1/4 mile from the White River, which feeds that lake. Not much I can do. I cannot keep any large fish, especially CC, because of the otter problem. Other neighbors have the same problem. The otters have a huge daily range.

For the above reason, I have not been very active on the threads. To make an otter fence around the ponds would be prohibitively expensive, plus it would interfere greatly with mowing, making a lot more maintenance necessary. I have decided that what will be, will be.

A number 330 Conibear type trap is your friend. See where they are entering and leaving and set a trap at the waterline. We took out 9 last year all through the same trap and location.

So darn cute....and deadly at the same time.

Friends, Otters are a huge problem to all of us, and they are only going to get much worse, there is a reason the old timers had these horrible animals nearly extinct and then our great government, with encouragement from various city dwellers that have never caught or tried to raise fish, decided it would be a great service to this country to reintroduce these vermin and let them proliferate.
We have not even seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these disgusting animals, they have no known predator to speak of and they multiply like rats in New York City, regardless of the warm, fuzzy story that Dick Van Schaik wrote in a past article of Pond Boss Magazine of what wonderful, harmless, playful, creatures they are that hardly reproduce enough to sustain their own population and barely kill enough fish to sustain themselves and only little ones at that, there will be ten times this many of these animals around in the near future because there is nothing to slow them down, and they hunt and kill for the shear fun of it.
Ask me how I know, we had a great fishing lake, producing some awesome fishing, reduced to a few small fish in a matter of a month, dead fish laying on the banks with a few bites out of them, just killed for the fun of it, and they start with the biggest fish in the lake. we have killed a dozen of them and they don't seem to be going anywhere, just raising more, getting pretty common to see one with 3 or 4 young ones behind her playing in the water, obviously not when one is carrying a firearm.
Unless there is a bounty put on them to slow the growth of the herd, fishing is going to be slim pickings in the very near future.

John....this makes three fish eating adult river otters trapped in last 6-8 weeks.

This morning my trapper buddy got a female at our property.

If you have otter in the area consistently and leaving sign, they are not overly hard to trap. Wish I were closer, would gladly come and help!