WASHINGTON — The Humane Society of the United States and The
Fund for Animals have joined to protest a plan put forth by the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that assigns responsibility for
managing “resident” Canada geese to overtaxed state wildlife
agencies and clears the way for the mass slaughter of millions
of the birds.
The plan, outlined in a draft environmental impact statement
(DEIS) released in February, fails to address the humane,
community-based programs that have arisen in many communities
to successfully resolve the issue of human-goose conflicts.
Instead, the USFWS plan favors embarking on a ten-year program
that calls for mass killing of adult and immature geese by
shipping birds to commercial slaughterhouse operations or
killing them in the field with lethal gas.
Once rare due to over-hunting, Canada geese were the focus
of federal and state breeding and relocation projects in the
1950’s and 60’s. The result of these projects has been the
dramatic increase in the numbers of geese who, never having had
the opportunity to learn natural migration patterns, have taken
up permanent residence in the U.S. The mowed grass and
meticulously manicured turf of golf courses, parks, and lawns
provide abundant food for geese, while artificial ponds provide
harborage from predators. Urban and suburban environments have
become ideal habitat for geese, enticing them to stay year
round and leading to recreational areas and yards impacted by
goose excrement. Though unsightly, scientific research has not
demonstrated that goose waste poses any serious health
threat.
Now in response to this human-made situation, the USFWS
wants to simply rid itself of the whole problem by turning over
authority dictated to it by Congress in accordance with the
Migratory Bird Treaty Act to the states. Dr. John Grandy,
Ph.D., senior vice president for Wildlife and Habitat
Protection for The Humane Society of the United States, says,
“This plan promotes unethical, unacceptable, and ineffective
responses to what we all agree is a need to reduce human-goose
conflicts. It projects four approaches for reaching a seemingly
randomly selected population number for resident Canada geese,
all of which would involve the killing of millions of animals
over a ten-year period. The “solution” that would be targeted
on goslings alone calls for the deaths of 800,000 immature
geese each year, after they have experienced only a few weeks
of life. Not only has the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
ignored successful, humane community-based programs, but they
have failed to provide the science that supports the idea that
their plan would actually reduce human-geese conflicts.”
The draft environmental impact statement also fails to
provide accurate descriptions of the roundup and gassing or
slaughter processes and buries the number of geese to be killed
at the end of the report. Such details are essential
information in the very public process of determining how to
best resolve humans’ conflicts with these animals.
Other serious shortcomings in the report include basing
recommendations on unreliable estimates of resident Canada
geese populations and a dearth of research on resident geese
behavior that would suggest that mass slaughter would reduce
conflicts with geese.
Michael Markarian, executive vice president of The Fund for
Animals, states, “The Fund and The HSUS, on behalf of the
millions of members and constituents we represent, are calling
on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to adopt humane,
community-based programs like the ones that have been
successful in Michigan, Virginia, Illinois, Massachusetts,
Delaware, New Jersey and many other places around the country.
The plan outlined in their DEIS ignores the fact that
education, egg addling, and aversive conditioning programs,
modified to fit the needs of each community, have been proven
to work. Their plan sends us down the horrible, bloody path of
having to kill hundreds of thousands of geese every year far
into the foreseeable future. People want humane and effective
solutions to wildlife conflicts, not a cruel and callous
slaughter of the wild animals with whom we share our
lives."
