The REAL Man Trap

By Alex in Everything Else, Pictures on Sep 9, 2008 at 1:51 am

How well do you know your animal traps? Our pal Rob H. of What is it? Blog has a neat featurette: a quiz of 28 of the strangest and most gruesome-looking animal traps.

This one above is the man trap:

A man trap, it was used by a wealthy land owner in England to catch poachers. It takes a key to open the jaws and they can’t be pried apart. It was designed so as not to break the leg, a small consolation since the victim probably paid with his life.

The stick was used as a trigger, it kept the jaws open and when stepped on, the trap was sprung.

Check out the entire list here: Link


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  1. andrew
    Sep 9th, 2008 at 2:14 am

    It seems lockpicking would be a very useful skill to have in this case.

  2. Jake B
    Sep 9th, 2008 at 7:41 am

    One of these man traps is featured prominently in the 1971 Dustin Hoffman movie “Straw Dogs”.

  3. kid_icarus
    Sep 9th, 2008 at 12:42 pm

    brutal….

  4. TwoDragons
    Sep 9th, 2008 at 2:20 pm

    *shudders* I found an old rusty trap on our property when I was a kid. Turns out a survivalist “friend” of ours put them out to catch himself some dinner, and didn’t think to tell us.

    I found several of them around our favorite swimming hole and promptly reported it to Mom. Thankfully, none of us found them the hard way. But for years afterward, we’d find one of them rusting somewhere on the property. It was tragic to hear something get caught in one of those…

    Oh, and our “friend” was not very welcome after that.

    –TwoDragons

  5. TwoDragons
    Sep 9th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

    Whoops–I meant “I found a whole bunch of old rusty traps”…Preview Is My Friend…

    –TwoDragons

  6. traphappy
    Oct 25th, 2009 at 4:06 pm

    if anyone has one of these old traps, or indeed any other old animal or bird traps that they wish to move on or sell leave a message and i will get back to you.. i actually collect these gruesome bygones…and i do mean collect, their days of use are fortunately long gone and outlawed!!


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