Animals can experience a range of physical injuries from snares including severe skin and soft tissue wounds due to friction, penetration, compression of muscles, nerves, and joints. Snares can disembowel animals or strangle them leading to fluid build-up in body tissues, entrapped or amputated body parts, or shock and resultant kidney failure. Compression or crushing from snares can cause a loss of blood supply (ischemia), which causes severe pain. Animals caught in snares designed to capture around the neck can experience breathlessness when their airways from the snare material and from ongoing blood flow to the brain that causes tissues to swell.

Even snares that hold an animal without causing pain will cause the animal significant fear, anxiety, and distress; they may also cause the animal to self-mutilate, be exposed to extreme temperatures or weather, or the risk of predation without the ability to escape.

Animals can experience welfare harms even if they have escaped or been released from a snare such as bruising, infections, injuries, and stress-related death.

SPCA opposes the use of snares because of the indiscriminate nature of the way in which they catch target and non-target animals.

SPCA opposes the use of all types of snares (i.e., free running, free running with fixed stops, and self-locking snares including those using stops, ratchets, etc.) because of the risk of welfare harms from injuries, distress, and prolonged time to death. Snares can capture unintended species or capture the animal by the wrong body part. This risk is higher when snares are used incorrectly.

SPCA advocates that only methods that minimise the negative welfare harms caused to targeted and non-targeted animals be used to trap or kill animals.