|
Post by SgtWal on Apr 17, 2006 8:34:00 GMT -6
There is a rumour going around on the otter market. If true this talk about a good market may be premature.
wayne
|
|
|
Post by seldom on Apr 17, 2006 13:52:23 GMT -6
Sorry it took so long for me to get back to you Lumberjack.
Possibly my definition or description of a fur boom could be misconstrued to mean price increase of market increase. Right now we’re only experiencing a simple market increase and I foresee no fur boom at all. Just as you mentioned, a simply supply/demand situation.
In my determination of a fur boom you have to be able to compare a price of a pelt to some hourly wage. If the price of a muskrat pelts approaches a median wage there will be a fur boom. This would transcend a simple price increase. Here are a couple of examples of what I determine as a fur boom.
In the early 50’s my uncle was a journeyman pipefitter for Dow and his son, my cousin, trapped mink & rats during high school. One mink was worth more then his dad’s 40-hour paycheck! There were trappers everywhere and several local country buyers. Most of these were the same buyers that were around for the 70’s-80’s boom.
1966 rats prices were about half of the starting hourly wage of an apprentice fitter/welder in Dow which was $1.67/hr.
In the midst of the last boom rats were running $7-$9 I was a journeyman welder for Dow making around $7/hr at that time. I know that in 1974 I was making $5.75/hr as a journeyman. Rats weren’t that high but coming on strong.
The point I’m trying to make or help you understand in my original post is that IMO when you see fur prices (I used rats because everybody can catch rats) meet or exceed middle-income wages you will have a fur boom. If you sucked smoke for an hour and rats were going for the same as your hourly wage without taxes, you don’t think trapping rats every chance you got doesn’t sound like easy money to you (not you specially Lumberjack)? Though I completely agree with Lumberjack’s comment concerning lack-of-interest of young people, money will trump that just as it did during the last boom. When you have the kind of money flowing as I’ve described, you’ll have more buyers trying to capitalize on it just as you’ll have more trappers doing the same.
Who would have thought a rat would bring you more then a journeyman tradesman’s hourly rate? What would you think if today, a rat would bring $25-$30? Don’t laugh anybody, they didn’t laugh in the early 80’s now did they! That is a fur boom not what we have now!!!
Back then I had folks just about everyday either asking me at work of calling me at home to see if I could teach them or their kids how to trap rats & coon. Ditches and creeks were plugged with traps. As I’d drive to work in the morning it was nothing to see 2-3 vehicles parked along the roads with adults checking traps in a few miles of ditches on their way to work. Rat houses in marshes to the north of me had so many stakes with different colors of ribbon it looked like a carnival! I trapped mostly reds back then and I’d drive across a picked bean field at 4:30 am and the next morning that field would have a spider webbing of truck tracks lacing it made by trespassers checking me out! The farmers would leave word with the wife that they’d run off one or two a couple of times a week! Houndsmen would pickup your coons and traps out of hand or, if they were being extra polite, they’d stand a limb up out in a field adjacent to your sets and hang your traps and beer cans on the branches!
No, the fur boom made more buyers and made more folks who trapped for as long as the easy money lasted. Real money is what brought them out of the woodwork pure and simple and when it dried up, they disappeared the same way. Again, I used rat prices compared to a middle-income hourly wage in my determination of a fur boom. If the two get close together ever again, there will be a fur boom but this little burp in demand has absolutely nothing to do with such a thing.
I think I write about like I talk and drive, I weave! J)
|
|
|
Post by robertw on Apr 17, 2006 15:11:23 GMT -6
Interesting comparison, union wages against the price of fur.
For alot of the rest of us...I was kid bucking little bales of hay in the hayfield (with my brothers) all summer long for $2.00 an hour. We sold (Ludy Sheda) our muskrats, ferrel cats and oppossums all for the same price, $8.00 each. This was four times what we could make an hour busting our butts working hourly wages as farm hands.
Doing the math...Muskrats will need to go to around $24 to generate the same competition that we experienced in the late 70s and early 80s. Coon would need to be averaging around $120 to equal this amount of activity.
|
|
|
Post by trappnman on Apr 17, 2006 16:25:10 GMT -6
Good post Seldom- yo unailed it.
one other factor I tink is important....25 years ago, kids and non trappersw were often 1 generation away from trappers- and had most of the equipment. Different times.
|
|
|
Post by Freak( Jim V.) on Apr 17, 2006 16:58:15 GMT -6
Set more traps! Run more Dukes!
|
|
|
Post by trappnman on Apr 17, 2006 18:47:33 GMT -6
I hate Dukes! pinched my finger in one today and it hurts...
Those that remember Loris thumb and the lugged Montana, can understand why she told me to "suck it up"...the very words I used to her, albiet in a kind and gentle way...to suck it up last fall....
paybacks are a female coyote....
|
|