Born Free USA’s Director of Canadian and Special Programs, Barry Kent MacKay, was quoted in the The Standard in opposition to the proposed hunt of double-crested cormorants in Ontario. Under the proposal, the province would list the species as a game bird, allowing hunters with outdoors card and small game licences to hunt them, with an open season from March 15 to December 31 each year. The proposal would establish a bag limit of 50 cormorants per day with no possession limit and would allow sport hunters to ‘spoil’ the birds — to let the animals rot where they are killed.
This proposal was made based on dubious science related to concerns that cormorants deplete fish populations and destroy the habitat in which they live. Responding to this assertion, MacKay told The Standard:
Cormorants being fish-eating birds are not ecologically able to deplete their own food supply, otherwise they would starve.