This is how our community (Conservation Officers) react to unwanted animals:
( I sent this letter to the local newspaper )
Fed bears are dead bears.
Very true, especially when you carry a tranquilizer gun! How absolutely disgusting that the sow and her two beautiful cubs were tranquilized and then put to death. I can't even call it euthanasia, as this was no mercy killing. It was quite simply "getting rid of a problem the easiest way possible".
I had to look up the word conservation again so I could fully understand what the word conservation meant, as it didn't seem to fit with the solution for the sow and her cubs. Conservation: the protection and careful management of the environment and its natural resources. Keeping nature from being destroyed, injured or wasted to ensure that use is sustainable. Nicely put, except that certainly isn't how conservation worked for these animals.
I would like someone to help me to understand how an immediate decision was made that these bears could not have been tagged, and then released back into the wilderness, but instead were immediately destroyed. I am very aware that the bears had learned some very bad habits, but this wilderness exists a short 15 minute drive away! Even the judicial system offers up all kinds of second chances for law breakers, and yet the ones that deserve a second chance, silent ones that inhabit the spaces that humans exist in are offered only one chance: stay behind the invisible line otherwise you die.
There is a complete wilderness that exists down in the GVRD location of Minnekhada Park. These animals should have been tagged and then transported over to this area ( which was more than likely their place of origin), and left to find a spot to bed down for the winter. There is an abundance of forest still very available to them that was not under a blanket of snow. At the very least they should have been offered a second chance. If they would have made their way back into human territory, then perhaps their fate should have been held in question then.
Even as it was very shallow minded of the individual that fed these bears, it was equally as shallow for the decision that was quickly made to destroy these beautiful creatures without offering them one chance to survive without using people's unsuspected offerings to forage upon.
Before the "conservation" officers arrived on the scene I had the opportunity to visit this mother sitting on the tree limb, with her cubs high above her. I could see in her eyes that she was waiting for the darkness to fall, so they could depart as quietly as they had arrived. Clearly the darkness that she had hoped for was not the one that lasts for eternity. What a shame.
These animals were clearly wronged by exactly the people that were supposed to protect them.
2 comments:
So I guess this wouldnt be the time to inquire about bear skin rugs?
Poor things.
No, not even funny. I was deeply disturbed as to their outcome, and it has taken me a week to read the article from the newspaper about their demise, let alone write about it. There was no humour in this article. WHAT SO EVER. This was equally as excrutiating painfulto absorb as the fact that one of the cubs ran to the other cub and pulled the dart out of it, as it was shot. How god damned inhumane is that, and equally not as funny. We do not treat dogs and cats this way, drunk drivers get second chances, creeps that kill and maime and destroy lives get second chances, and yet these magnificent creatures get nothing. This mother bear had nurtured those cubs from the moment they were born, and this is the end of their lives, retrieving a dart from the dying sibling. It's sick, and it's need to end.
If only I could write down the number of hours that I have spent standing, watching, observing and photographing these creatures would someone fully understand the complete injustice that have been imposed upon these animals that have know one to speak for them, exept for their hides.
Post a Comment