Then Tio's death called them to action.
The Victor couple wrote a two-page account telling of their dog's death during Christmas week and calling for stiffer laws for trapping. They've started an organization to work on the cause: Trapping Information Offensive, Montana, with the acronym TIO.
Klouda sees trapping as "drift netting the forest."
"It is a craft," Klouda said in an interview at the couple's rural home on 40 acres outside Victor. "But is it necessary anymore? Is the cruelty that you have to perpetuate to do that worth having in your life?"
Klouda, a nurse, and Cherry, an addictions counselor to youths in the Bitterroot, have lived on their 40 acres almost 20 years. When they moved there, they said, they got permission from their neighboring landowner to walk on their land. They don't leash their dogs - Tio was one of five - when they go walking.
"We thought they were safe," Klouda said.
Fred Simsonsen, who lives in the area, had permission to trap coyotes as predators on land north of Klouda and Cherry's land. He shot Tio when the dog was caught in one of his traps, he said, at least two miles from Cherry and Klouda's house. He had seen him chasing livestock, he said, bunching up cows against a fence corner. He would have shot him if he had seen him running, too, he said.
"It's their fault," he said in a phone interview, "because that dog was chasing cows."
He's been trapping since he was a kid in the Bitterroot, he said, 40 or 50 years. His traps are always more than 1,000 feet from houses. He has rarely caught dogs because most people contain them, he said. Dogs don't belong where there are cows, deer and elk.
"If you catch a dog, it isn't supposed to be there in the first place," he said. "It's up there where it ain't supposed to be."
Tio was never aggressive to humans, Cherry and Klouda said. He was an independent thinker, as Great Pyrenees are, but he never chased other animals.
"Tio was a nice dog," Klouda said. "He had no beef with humans. He didn't chase cattle. We live next to ranches, so we're careful to train our dogs to stay away from cattle."
Klouda and Cherry are calling for legislation that requires every trapper to have a license (licenses are not required for resident trappers to trap predators) and mandatory trapper education to get a license. Present law says traps "should" be checked every 48 hours; they would like the law to require checking traps every 12 hours. And the law, they say, should require posted notification of traps in the area.
"You don't need any education to get a trapping license," Cherry said. "I think that's wrong."
Trapping has always come up against other land uses, but the conflicts used to be occasional, said Bob Sheppard, vice president for the western region of the Montana Trappers Association and chairman of its trapper education program. Rapid growth, especially in the Bitterroot and Flathead valleys, is closing off a lot of ground to traditional uses, he said from his home north of Ovando.
"It's a delicate subject, you know," he said. "We teach people other people are using the area. Things are changing. In some cases, you just don't trap, even if it's your right.
"It takes a lot more human interaction than it used to."
Even around the Ovando Valley, where Sheppard has trapped for 30 years, he said, more people are moving in, which invites conflict.
The Trappers Association education workshops have been offered more than 20 years, he said.
"We try to teach a moral and ethical approach - the right traps to set in certain areas, where to set them," he said. "We spend a lot of time on the ethics of this because of just what you're talking about (Cherry and Klouda's case)."
Sheppard does not know enough about the incident to comment on it, he said.
"There's a huge problem with people just allowing their dogs to run," he said. "There's a responsibility there, too."
The Trappers Association teaches that the proper thing to do when a dog or cat is caught in a trap is to notify its owner if the animal is wearing tags and to take it to a veterinarian if it's injured. All trappers he knows do that, Sheppard said.
Most animals are unhurt by the traps, he said.
"They're not leg-crushing, bone-tearing tools that we use," he said.
Three of Sheppard's five hounds have accidentally been caught in his traps, he said. They were not injured. He wouldn't want them to be hurt.
"They're all part of my family," he said. "They stay in the tent with me in the mountains."
Overall, Montana trappers are proud of the self-education they do, he said, and their ability to work closely with the state's Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks. That ability, he said, has allowed trapping to be regulated by ethics and common sense rather than overburdening game wardens with more enforcement.
"The problem is that it's all changing," he said. "Trapping still is a very useful wildlife tool. It controls disease in predators."
"It's a difficult issue. And it's not going to get any better."
Growth has escalated conflicts with trappers a bit, "But there have always been incidents," said Rory Zarling, a Fish, Wildlife and Parks conservation specialist.
"Trapping always brings up issues," he said.
The regulations for trapping and hunting furbearers are 12 pages long. They include the requirement that traps must be tagged with the trapper's name and identification number and that ground traps must be set at least 30 feet from the centerline of any public road, hiking trail or cross-country ski trail and 1,000 feet from a campground.
"Non-target species" that are trapped must be released uninjured; if they're injured, the trapper must immediately notify a Fish, Wildlife and Parks employee.
Traps "should" be checked every 48 hours and must be picked up at the end of the season.
"It's just common courtesy or ethics to release a dog or a cat," Zarling said. "Typically, they are released. Most trappers are pretty good about it."
Dogs do get caught periodically, he said, though Fish, Wildlife and Parks doesn't keep hard numbers.
In her legislation, now in draft form, Gutsche plans to mandate trapper education; mandate notifying the owner of a domestic animal caught in a trap if it has tags; and require trap checking at intervals.
That might be 48 hours, she said in an interview from Helena, even though some people want more frequent checks. Her research has found that more often is not realistic in many wild places in the state, she said. The details are still being tweaked, she said.
"I've gotten actually quite a number of e-mails from people," she said. "But I'm also listening to the people from Fish, Wildlife and Parks who enforce the regulations and know what's realistic."
Bitterroot veterinarian Linda Perry, who travels the valley as a mobile vet and has practiced in the Bitterroot for 10 years, didn't used to see many trap injuries in pets. In the past year, she has known of four, she said - two dogs and two cats.
"The trap injuries are more noticeable to me this year," she said.
One of her clients in Corvallis, a cat, was gone for several days and came home dragging a trap that it had dug out of the ground.
"It must have worked on it for hours," she said.
Even if a trap doesn't break the skin, Perry said, it often leads to an animal losing its leg.
"The blood supply's gone for so long, you're looking at amputations after a while," she said. "And they can break their leg trying to get out."
Perry would like to see traps mandated to be far away from residential areas.
"As an individual, I think there should be regulation against setting traps where a regular dog or cat out for a walk could get caught," she said.
John Bell, the deputy county attorney who's assigned to look into Cherry and Klouda's case, received a 20-page report from the sheriff's office on Jan. 26. He hasn't had time to study it, he said. He can't think of a law the trapper would have violated, but he can't tell, he stressed, until he knows every fact of the case.
"The guy clearly has a civil case against him," he said. "But whether any law was violated is very unclear."
He has never seen a case like this, he said, of a trapper shooting a dog he caught.
The Ravalli County Dog Ordinance prohibits dogs from being "at large," he said.
"I'm not trying to pick on these people," he said. "But their dog was at large."
Cherry and Klouda say that Tio was on land they had permission to walk and run their dogs on. They say that Simonsen didn't have to tell them that he hadn't seen their dog while they searched for four days at Christmas. And he didn't have to shoot Tio twice in the top of the head for getting caught in his trap.
"I realize we maybe put our dogs in harm's way," Cherry said. "But we didn't shoot them. We didn't pull the trigger."
Reporter Ginny Merriam can be reached at 523-5251 or at gmerriam@missoulian.com
Trapping workshop
The Montana Trappers Association will offer a Trappers Education Workshop on Saturday at the Fish, Wildlife and Parks building at 3201 Spurgin Road in Missoula from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. The public is welcome. There is no fee. The association's Web site is www.montanatrappers.org.
Brian Cherry and Peg Klouda and The Trapping Information Offensive, Montana can be reached at tiomontana@netscape.net.
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