How to Make a Snare | Live Free or Die: DIY

[Music] If you're planning on catching an animal, one of the simplest kinds of traps that you can build is a snare. You can make it out of a vine, a piece of cordage, string, or a piece of electrical appliance cord. Now, I don't have electricity, so I don't have any appliances, but you find this stuff in the trash and dumpsters. It's pretty easy to take this stuff apart.

What you want to do is take the rubber cord off of it. You just grab one end and get some friction, and pull the rubber off of it. I'm simply going to trim it off with the edge of my knife. Now my next step is to decide how many strands I need, and they're not twisted very tightly, so I can just pull them apart.

What I want to do with it now is twist it back together. I just need to twist it one way, just enough to make it hold together. What I want is a slip knot on the end of it, but I'd like a slip knot that locks. The simplest way that I found is to simply tie a loop that's doubled. Once you tie a loop that's doubled, get it as small as possible and twist it together.

What you have then is a little tiny loop. The way this works is once I put the other end in it, when I pull it tight, it'll tend to grip itself. Then I've got the snare wire. I'm going to make a loop about the right size for my target animal. The target animal is going to be a rabbit. This is a rabbit, and he walks with his ears back. He's about the size of my fist like this.

I want him to squeeze through easily, and as he pulls through, it simply slides around his neck. Anchor the snare to something solid, and this small tree should hold. Now what I've got to do next is figure out how high their rabbit's head is off the ground, so I need that about right there.

What I found is the best way to hold it in place where you want it is to simply wrap your snare around a stick, then I'll shove that in the ground. So now I have a rabbit trail with a piece of copper wire coming across it. It looks totally natural. It'll work for a day, a week, even a year. All I got to do is come by and check it.

So, rabbits are going from garden to garden in the neighborhood, just walking along. "Man, there's a nice looking garden over there! I think those people are at work today. Wow, this is great! I'm going to check out their lettuce." "Oh, I can get through that no problem at all! Man, I can't reach that!"

And at night, you'll have a rabbit laying right there, ready to go with your vegetables—rabbit stew. [Music]