Today for Mousetrap Monday We're going to take a look at one of the craziest rodent traps that was ever patented in the United States. This was patented by James a Williams of Texas, in 1882, and he called it an animal trap. It doesn't look like much, it's a baseboard three vertical posts, we have a metal spring and back connected to a lever that goes up and down This lever has a rod that goes all the way to back and then there's a trigger in front, you push that down, you put bait under this trigger, when it's removed the spring goes up and this rod goes back. Now this doesn't look much like an animal trap until you add the second component of this, which is a pistol revolver, here I have my Smith & Wesson .22 6 shooter. It's unloaded, you always want to be safe when handling firearms. This slides into the grooves like this, It's pointed right in front of the trigger, and the way it works is this rod fits behind the trigger of the gun, and you set it, and it will go off.. when the rodent trips the front. Now in the Patent Application, William describes this trap, as an invention to provide a means by which an animal burrowing in the ground can be destroyed, and which gives an alarm every time it goes off so it can be reset. So the idea is you put this in a burrow, when the animal disturbs the front it will kill it, you'll hear the shot and you can go reset it, it will work for rats, gophers, moles. Now I'm sure you're curious to see how this is set ? I want to be very careful, but what you do is you push this front lever down, it's under the spring back here so it has some tension, and then we have the little trigger in front holding it in place Then you pull back the hammer on the gun, locks it into place, and you put that trigger right there. Then when the animal comes and releases the front trigger, it goes off, and it works pretty much every time. Now I'm going to show you how this works We're gonna go set it up in the field, maybe shoot an orange or a piece of fruit. Before I show you how this trap works. I want to give a word of caution, This trap is not safe with live rounds. I'm not gonna use a live round I don't want to let bullet ricocheting and potentially hurting someone, so I'm gonna use a blank cartridge. I got this at the hardware store they're designed for driving nails into concrete, so they provide quite a shock blast. If you saw my recent trap video they use blanks and it's pretty devastating on rodents, so I'm only gonna use blanks No projectiles, but it's more than enough to kill a rat. And what we're gonna do is shoot this into an orange and see how much damage it does. It's not safe I don't recommend it, so don't do this with live rounds. But we're gonna go set this up and use it, and just so you know, the language in the patent was pretty interesting They weren't as concerned about safety They said that an added benefit of this invention would be to use in conjunction with the door or window, to kill any person or thing opening that window or door, so.. originally it was designed to kill rodents, but possibly even people breaking into your house. But we're just gonna use blanks and demonstrate how it works on fruit. Okay, the traps all set and ready to go, pretend the orange is a rodent, coming to nibble on the pretzel, holding that trigger, the guns ready to shoot, all it needs to do is have that pretzel move just a little bit, once you disturb it, Bang! and look at right there.. That's going to do more than enough damage to kill a rodent. I've been giving a lot of thought into how I want to finish this YouTube video Normally when we test out a new trap, we go set it up in the barn with motion cameras and see how it works with real rats and mice. But this is a different kind of trap than any that I've tested before, because it involved a real gun, as a gun owner I consider that a huge responsibility to always operate your firearms in a safe manner, and leaving it unattended where it could go off, is not a good idea. It's not safe, It's not a good example to set, and it's probably not legal. I don't know the laws, against basically leaving a booby trap out, but I'm sure there's some strict penalties, and I just don't want to deal with that, so I do want to test this out, we're gonna set it up in the barn, but it's gonna be unloaded, if you're one of those people who are gonna complain, you want to see a rodent getting shot, I recently posted a video featuring the mole cat trap, above-ground with a rat. It fires a blank cartridge, but it was pretty devastating, I couldn't show that on my regular youtube channel, Its only available on my website, and i'll put the link in the description below. (Loud Bang) It would basically do the same thing as this gun trap if it was loaded, but what we're gonna do is we're gonna go set it up in the barn, a rat's gonna come trip it, and it's gonna be the luckiest rat in the world cuz all it's gonna hear is a 'Click' instead of a boom, so hopefully you enjoy seeing this rodent trap designed from 1882 in action, even though it's going to be unloaded. That's just the safe thing to do let's go test it out. ' CLICK '
