Youth vs. experience

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/04/2012 (4966 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba Conservation — or Devastation?

 

To quote an article about black bears on the Manitoba Conservation website: “Conflicts develop when people and bears lose their fear and respect for each other.”

No doubt the little cub named Makoon that Rene Dubois rescued may have lost some of its fear of humans (animals have been known to appreciate people who saved their lives), but I dare say conservation officials have lost even more — and that’s their respect for both bears and people.

Their heavy-handed approach in expecting to release the cub into the wild while ignoring all pleas to send it to a rehabilitation site smacks of indifference toward wildlife, if not downright ignorance. I totally agree with the website’s claim that for some people, “the bear is seen as a cute and cuddly ‘Hollywood’ character that is charismatic and often enamoured.” More realistic people, however, acknowledge that “bears can also be fierce predators” who belong in the wild.

So why not give Makoon a chance?

In such cases, “conservation” officials, and rightly so, get the reputation of being indifferent to the plight of animals in distress. A few years back in our suburb, a deer gave birth on a neighbour’s lawn in the middle of the night. When the doe left the scene, the neighbour called Manitoba Conservation to see what could be done about the fawn.

“Just leave it alone. The doe will come back for it,” was the advice given.

The neighbour took the day off work to keep a respectful guard over the small animal curled up in a flower bed, hoping against hope the doe would return at dark. She never did, and the fawn was dead by the next morning. Common sense would have told anybody, conservationists included, that the doe would not return. In the wild, yes, but in a city suburb teeming with people and traffic? No way.

Another friend seeking advice about protecting a mallard’s nest from a roving fox felt her concern was treated as more of a joke. “Oh, foxes just love a feed of duck eggs!” replied the conservation official.

Citizens are upset, frustrated, disappointed and heartbroken when seeking help for distressed animals and quite the opposite occurs. Had Mr. Dubois only known and contacted an out-of-province rehab site directly, Makoon would have been in caring hands. As it is, treating the public’s concern for wildlife with such contempt is earning Manitoba Conservation the more appropriate title of Manitoba Devastation.

— Alma Barkman is a Winnipeg freelance writer,

photographer and homemaker

Bear cub threatens delicate ego-systems

 

2He sees a living bear and decides it will die that day. He sees dying Makoon in a ditch and decides it will live.

A concern, though, is the treatment Makoon may face while being rehabilitated at Assiniboine Park Zoo. Makoon will not only become even more habituated to humans, it may even become hostile. That would certainly cause some conflicts.

There is no way Makoon will suffer a fate similar to Topsy the elephant, famously filmed by Thomas Edison in 1903. But the elephant’s story should give pause for thought.

After a zookeeper fed her a lit cigarette for his own entertainment, she squished him under her foot. Rampant with rage, she went on to crush two more zookeepers. She faced death by hanging until the SPCA found an alternate solution.

“She was fed cyanide-laced carrots moments before a 6,600-volt AC charge slammed through her body,” wrote Tony Long for Wired.com .

A wolf near Birds Hill National Park killed a family dog named Spencer in April. In response, Manitoba Conservation set out leg traps — the kind you’d have to gnaw your leg off to escape.

The family described the killer wolf as the size of a deer. But the wolf that ended up being shot was small. There are no future plans of hunting other wolves in the area, but an unsuspecting skunk was caught in the crossfire.

Before the wolf was caught, Spencer’s owner told CBC news she didn’t want to see the wolf put down. She just wanted people to be careful.

Manitoba Conservation wildlife manager Barry Verbiwski told the media he, too, would prefer to “leave the wild in the wild,” but saw no other recourse.

“These wolves have been habituated to people… now they’ve gone a bit too far where they’ve destroyed dogs, so we can’t take the chance (of them doing) the same thing somewhere else,” said Verbiwski.

Perhaps it isn’t Manitoba Conservation’s duty to conserve wildlife at all. It seems their real job is to conserve the tame lifestyle we humans are habituated to.

A better solution would be to let nature be nature, but that might only harm our delicate ego-systems, challenging the belief it’s our right to choose which animals die and which get by.

 

— Kirah Sapong is a Creative Communications student at Red River College