Last weekend was spent trying to draft, on behalf of ourselves and several animal protection organizations, a joint letter to a provincial parliamentary standing committee charged with considering a change to the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act that will allow hunters to kill up to 50 double-crested cormorants per day, throughout nearly the entire year, leaving their bodies to rot, as explained here.
The cormorant is not a game species and its rank flesh is virtually inedible.
So, Premier Doug Ford has decided to redefine “game” by changing a key component of the Act that prohibits the spoilage of animals legally hunted as “game” so that dead cormorants can be left to rot. I know, because I’ve seen what they wrote, that the idea is opposed by Premier Doug Ford’s own staff. Our tax money goes to pay scientists who tell Ford what he ignores.
The problems associated with this idea are numerous, but among the most serious is the potential to spread disease as dead cormorants are buried in shallow graves, hidden under logs and bushes, sunk into water, or simply left where they fall. The newly proposed subsection of the Act does not mandate ecologically responsible disposal of the remains, and, even if it did, it would be totally unenforceable.
Most Ontarians know little or nothing about cormorants and many familiar with the bird buy into the misinformation that cormorants are somehow bad for the environment.
It was human nature to demonize predatory animals before science began to fully understand their importance to the ecosystem overall. Even so, many people still have a 19th century belief that anything that consumes what we want must be bad andthus controlled or eliminated. It may well be that more people are uneducated about such things than are well informed on the subject.
Presumably, Ford thinks he is appealing to a majority of the electorate. Even if, and I’m not sure it’s true, in appealing to prejudice against cormorants Ford really is appealing to a majority, he faces losing at least some of even that support by promoting the only wild game management legislation I know of that says it is okay to let game spoil. It’s killing for the sake of killing and I know hunters who are appalled by the idea.
Ford is a populist and populists tend to have disdain for facts, for expertise, so I’m not at all confident that sanity will prevail, but as a member of what is by far the most deadly of all species, I’m dedicated to the effort; we all are.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
