Trap shooting is one of the three major forms of competitive clay pigeon shooting

Clay pigeon shooting

Clay pigeon shooting, also known as clay target shooting, and formally known as Inanimate Bird Shooting, is the art of shooting at special flying targets, known as clay pigeons or clay targets, with a shotgun or any type of firearm....

  (shotgun

Shotgun

A shotgun is a firearm that is usually designed to be fired from the shoulder, which uses the energy of a fixed shell to fire a number of small spherical pellets called shot, or a solid projectile called a slug...

 shooting at clay targets). The others are skeet shooting

Skeet shooting

Skeet shooting is one of the three major types of competitive shotgun target shooting sports . There are several types of skeet, including one with Olympic status , and many with only national recognition.- General principles :Skeet is a recreational and competitive activity where...

 and sporting clays

Sporting Clays

Sporting clays is a form of clay pigeon shooting, often described as "golf with a shotgun" because a typical course includes from 10 to 15 different shooting stations laid out over natural terrain...

. There are many versions including Olympic trap

Olympic Trap

Officially referred to only as trap, and also known in the United States as international trap, bunker trap, trench or international clay pigeon, the single-target Olympic trap shooting event has a history over a hundred years old...

, Double trap

Double Trap

Double trap is a clay pigeon shooting sport, one of the ISSF shooting events. Participants use a shotgun to attempt to break a clay disk flung away from the shooter at high speed....

 (which is also an Olympic event), Down-The-Line

Down-The-Line

Down-the-line clay pigeon shooting is a variation of trap shooting which is very popular in Australia, New Zealand , South Africa, Zimbabwe, Canada, the United Kingdom and Ireland....

, and Nordic trap. American trap is most popular in the United States and Canada. American trap has two independent governing bodies: the Amateur Trapshooting Association, which sanctions shoots throughout the United States and Canada, and the Pacific International Trapshooting Association, which sanctions shoots on the West Coast.

The sport is in some ways a replacement for a game where the targets were live pigeons.