Commercial Trapline & Game Preserve
The industry — Hunting and trapping
Base industry report for 1142 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 116
- Under 10 employeesA
- 91%
- Establishments · USA
- 434
- Employment · USA
- 1,899
- Payroll · USA
- $86M
Of 116 Canadian establishments with employees, 91% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Widen the definition, or stack this niche with others. The prize as drawn will not carry a business on its own; it may still be worth owning as one line of several.
Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 2
The binding constraint — market size
The pre-screen said licence-bound and tiny; the numbers say tiny is the operative word. Entry is cheap — a trapper's course, a licence, a registered line or a landowner's permission, a snowmobile and steel. What is missing is revenue. The Fur Institute of Canada's compilation of provincial wildlife-agency returns puts all wild fur sold in Canada in 2023–24 at 330,710 pelts worth C$12.76M, down from 916,572 pelts and C$48.96M in 2012–13 [B]. That is the whole country's crop, shared among every licensed trapper, and it would not make one mid-sized business. The Northwest Territories, which markets its fur actively, reported 7,421 pelts sold for C$582,043 across the entire 2025 season — and pays trappers a start-up grubstake of up to C$2,000 to keep them on the land [A]. Price is set at a single auction in North Bay by a handful of international buyers; in June 2025 muskrat averaged C$1.99 and beaver C$15.18. Trapping persists as culture, wildlife management and side income, not as an enterprise, which is why 75% of the 116 establishments have one to four employees and none has fifty. The money adjacent to this code — guided hunts for non-residents — is classified with hunting and fishing camps at 721212 and was not screened here. Game preserves were not separately researched.
Wild fur is a globally traded commodity: Canadian pelts are consigned to auction in North Bay and bought by international brokers for garment makers abroad, so the price a trapper receives is set by world fashion demand, not by anything local. The trapline itself is a local registered territory, but it is the auction, not the territory, that determines whether the activity pays.
Sectors joined: Ocean Tech
[UNVERIFIED] Sector-to-NAICS mapping is analyst judgment — see data/angel-sector-map.json. Counts are a per-record cross-reference and are not additive across records.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every operator named on this record, and what each one discloses. A private single-site operator discloses nothing, which is the normal case — the listed consolidators are the only window in.
Competitor set · 5 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fur Harvesters Auction Inc.A | not disclosed | — | North Bay, Ontario. The consignment channel for Canadian wild fur and, in practice, the price-setter: an entrant does not compete with it, an entrant ships to it and accepts what the room pays. 245,862 pelts offered at the June 2026 sale alone. |
| The Russian sable auctionsB | not disclosed | — | Named in FHA's own June 2026 sale report as having run immediately before it, with clearances of 50% or less and prices down from February. They are the competing supply for the same international buyers, and a bad Russian sale is what a Canadian trapper's marten price is measured against. |
| The other 115 Canadian establishments, and the licensed trappers behind themA | not disclosed | — | 116 establishments with employees, 87 of them with one to four and none with fifty. This is the competitive structure: not firms fighting for share but individuals working registered lines, against a national crop worth C$12.76M in 2023–24. |
| Country buyersC | not disclosed | — | Local dealers who buy pelts off the line for cash rather than waiting for auction settlement. Named from general knowledge of how the trade works; no count, volume or margin was sourced for this record. |
| Saga Furs Oyj (Nasdaq Helsinki: SAGCV)C | not disclosed | — | The listed Finnish auction house, and the surviving venue on the farmed side of the trade. Not researched for this record; it is named to mark where the farmed-fur price is set, not as a competitor for Canadian wild pelts. |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. The national series was read directly in the Fur Institute of Canada's bilingual report 'Canadian Wild Fur Production from 2010 to 2023' (February 2026, returns dated January 2026); it is an industry body's compilation of government returns, so it is tiered B, and the 2023–24 total omits two territories. Statistics Canada stopped publishing fur statistics after 2011 and its archived tables are no longer served. The NWT figures and per-pelt prices were read in the territorial government's own June 2025 auction report [A]. That North Bay is now the one remaining Canadian wild-fur auction and that its buyers are few is general knowledge, not sourced here. Not sourced: the number of trappers actually working a line (the Fur Institute counts licences issued, which is not the same thing), any income per trapper, and anything on commercial game preserves — the second activity in this code — which may have different economics. Guide-outfitting was deliberately left out because it is classified elsewhere. The competitive-field block was built on Fur Harvesters Auction's own sale-results report for 2–4 June 2026, downloaded as a PDF from furharvesters.com: the per-species offering counts, clearance rates and Canadian-dollar averages are read from its table [A], and the 245,862 total is this record's sum of that column, so it is tiered B. The remarks on record gross sales, buyer attendance and the Russian sable auctions are the auction house's own statements about its own sale [B] — self-reported, unquantified in the case of the gross, and not independently checked. One thing a reader must not miss: the prices on this record's scale block are the Northwest Territories' 2025 averages and the Fur Institute's 2023–24 crop, and fur prices moved up sharply in 2026 — marten from C$98.96 to C$190.50, muskrat from C$1.99 to C$5.54. That does not disturb the cut, because the whole Canadian crop was C$12.76M at the bottom and a four-fold price move on 330,710 pelts still does not make one mid-sized business, but it does mean the 2023–25 figures are no longer current prices. The cut factor is analyst judgment, though on these figures it is not a close call.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
National body with harvester, wholesaler and other member categories; compiles the provincial wild-fur sales figures the record cites. No member count stated.
Provincial trappers' body; runs the trapper education course, a magazine and an AGM; 2026/27 membership $28.25 with licence. No member count stated.
Provincial trappers' body with locals, a magazine and annual reports. No member count stated.
US national trappers' body with state affiliates; publishes American Trapper. No member count stated.
Second US national trappers' body with state chapters and an annual Rendezvous. Its old .com domain no longer resolves.
Busiest independent trapping board (UBB.threads); Trapper Talk showed 92 viewers when checked, posts dated June 2026. No member count on index.
Long-running hunting, fishing and fur-trapping magazine; site is minimal but live.
Fur Harvesters Auction's convention at North Bay, Ontario; page lists January 9-10, 2026 edition with demonstrations and competitions.
BC Trappers Association (bctrappers.ca) and Saskatchewan Trappers Association (saskatchewantrappers.com) are also live provincial bodies. Trapper & Predator Caller's site did not respond. Reddit feeds were unreachable.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.