I received an email this morning from Donna Dubreuil of the Ottawa-Carlton Wildlife Centre that the wildlife groups working with the city of Ottawa on a ‘wildlife plan’ have resigned and asked that their names not be included in the report.
WILDLIFE ORGANIZATIONS RESIGN FROM OTTAWA’S WILDLIFE STRATEGY WORKING GROUP
Wednesday, September 12, 2012: Wildlife organizations, appointed to help develop a Wildlife Strategy for Ottawa, have resigned in frustration, requesting that their organizations’ names be removed from any final document produced by the city.
Donna DuBreuil, president of the Ottawa-Carleton Wildlife Centre (OCWC) said “we regret having to make this decision because we were instrumental in bringing the proposal for a progressive Wildlife Strategy forward to Council. However, we cannot endorse the Wildlife Strategy Report because it will not change the very negative climate for wildlife in Ottawa and, in fact, further entrench outdated attitudes”.
Liz White, spokesperson for the Ontario Wildlife Coalition (OWC) and a member of the Wildlife Strategy Working Group, has also submitted her organization’s resignation. “I have very serious concerns not only with the substance of the report but the process used. It seems the community organizations were simply used as window dressing and that staff had never any intention of implementing real changes to the status quo, explaining why the process was dragged out for two and a half years,” said White.
The development of a Wildlife Strategy was prompted by Ottawa residents who were angry and embarrassed with the City’s long-standing approach to wildlife in the Nation’s Capital that included shooting moose, trapping beavers and coyotes and gassing groundhogs in neighbourhood parks.
Wow. I am so loathe to have wildlife folks ever ‘leave the table’ because it takes so much work to even be invited to the table in the first place, and almost any influence is better than no influence, but when i read this I understood. I remembered poignantly when our own city was determined to install sheetpile through the beavers lodge and invited me to be on a “Citizen oversight” committee, that couldn’t advise, halt, influence, delay or affect the work in anyway.
I declined.
Donna and Liz outline their concerns clearly:
- the on-going trapping and killing of beavers throughout the city
- the labelling of wildlife as “nuisances”
- the inclusion of lethal trapping or live trapping in combination with euthanasia as options for dealing with “nuisance” wildlife
- a large mammal response that remains secretive and unaccountable to the public
- demonstration projects to evaluate flow devices where there is no beaver, little water and no
- risk and, even if there were, the devices installed have been designed to fail
- education and outreach projects that will provide little benefit to the majority of Ottawa residents
- the recommendation for the hiring of a Wildlife Biologist at a cost of $100,000 annually to support these questionable endeavours
You can go read the whole thing here, including the secret Rural plan for continuing to kill wildlife that city staff has jokingly referred to as the “Trapper’s Manifesto”. The decision merited nice response from the media which hopefully will continue to shine some uncomfortable light on this issue.
As I said at the time….
