TNhunter
Those are some pretty impressive catches!
I remember back in the early 90's(in Wisconsin), we were averaging about $18 per coon, and that was for just skinning and selling. The most we took was 38 coon. I remember some xlg coon brought about $36-38. Plus what ever we picked up dead in the road. I remember my wife was trained to pick up dead animals she found while driving down the road. I remember the day she came home with two nice large coon in the trunk of the car. She was so proud. I remember we got just over $40 for those two coon. Those were tough days financially, so money from furs was a big help.
We had a huge fur buyers shop in our area. And he would buy many Coon and other furs, but mostly coon that were only skun or in the round. He told me that he buys a minimum of 10,000 coon each year. They had a huge wal-in freezer that had thousands of skun unfleshed coon stacked up like firewood along each wall of that freezer. Pretty amazing.
We had a farmer in our area that trapped coon real heavy with his son. He told me he catches about 600-800 coon per year. They would only set traps that they could drive right up to the set. The father would drive and his son would jump out and check each set. Their best season was just over 980 coon and thats when the prices were $16-18 for average size coon. The farmer was bummed that they did'nt catch 1000. I expect they got paid about $18,000-20,000 that year for coon that were only skun out. Not too bad for about 2 1/2 months of trapping. They were truely Professional Trappers. Unfotunately, those high coon prices only lasted about four years.
I could only dream about catching that much fur!
classicfur
