My Last Middle Island Blog, Yes, But Just For Now A Tale of Just Two Innocent Creatures

Published 06/06/13 Born Free USA

My last two blogs dealt with the days spent in a boat anchored just offshore of Middle Island, in the southern end of Lake Erie, the very southernmost land still in Canada, mere yards from where the country ends and the United States begins. I was there with my colleague, Liz White, to monitor and record Parks Canada's deadly assault on nesting double-crested cormorants. Staff armed with small calibre rifles and accompanied by spotters would walk up and down the island's length, usually hidden from our view by thick vegetation, shooting the nesting cormorants, and in the process causing havoc among the great blue herons, black-crowned night-herons, Canada geese and herring and ring-billed gulls also trying to make nests, lay eggs and raise babies on the otherwise uninhabited island. Great egrets were there, too, but the shooting has driven them completely away, even though they are noted for "nest site tenacity", the quality of staying with their nest even under duress.

One Parks Canada staffer would stay aboard the boat that brought the crew over from the mainland, an hour and a half trip. The shooters were trying to kill the cormorants with head shots, aiming carefully at a small, moving target. Birds who had their beaks clipped by bullets or were otherwise wounded by in ways that allowed them to fly, would flee to die or recover as best they could. But if the bullet brought them down to the ground they would tend to make their way to shore, and often into the water. There they would be pursued by the powered boat, diving to get away until, too tired and waterlogged to again dive, they awaited the blast of a 12 gauge shotgun; "euthanasia". Even then some found the energy to dive at the gun's flash, and sometimes it took two or three shots to render the birds dead.

These are nesting birds, bound by an instinctive imperative to maintain a presence at the nest. Except under intense duress one or both parents are always at the nest while there are eggs or young chicks. Cormorants swim and eat fish, but their plumage is not like that of loons, grebes or ducks; it is not entirely waterproof. Therefore they are limited in how long they could stay in the water.

And that was the plight of the two birds we saw on shore that the shooters and spotters had somehow missed reporting. What to do? We had neither the practical means nor the legal right to rescue them. To leave them meant that they would die slowly. Cormorants need to be able to fly to survive and these birds clearly would never fly again. The first was sluggish, perhaps bleeding internally, the second was more alert, but with an obviously shattered wing.

And so we called them in, on the boat's radio. On each occasion the power boat came as close to shore as was safe. With the gunmen on the island, and the boat looming nearer, the birds did what instinct directed, and took to the water. There, in spite of their respective wounds, each was able to swim hundreds of yards, gently chased by the Park's Canada boat, the intent presumably being to tire them. Cormorants can, when shot at with a shotgun, dive at the sight of the flash and be mostly or totally under the water by the time the shotgun pellets arrive. But I suspect, as well, the Parks Canada staff wanted to get the bird away from us and our cameras. Before the booming shots were fired the boat would position itself between us and the wounded bird, and I can't help but think this was intentional.

The wounded birds never had a chance. Their reward for not hurting any of our kind while simply fulfilling natural functions that have evolved through three billion years of life on earth, was to be first wounded, and then relentlessly, inescapably hunted down by the vast power we humans command with our internal combustion engines and high-powered firearms, and killed.

My emotions were mixed. I didn't want to aid the culling or see these birds killed, but on the other hand it would be cruel to let them suffer; we had to report them. But perhaps the most profound emotion of all was a sense of deep shame for my kind, mixed with admiration for the cormorants and anger at Parks Canada. The cormorants do nothing but ask their small share of a world we continually crowd out, and we deny them even that.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA
Zoocheck Inc.

The Species I Fear the Most, Or How I Spent the Past Few Days

Published 05/10/13 Born Free USA

OK. I’ll fill in the details in a later blog, but I here I want to talk about just getting back from Middle Island, a tiny 46-acre island in Lake Erie. I was anchored offshore, meters from the U.S. border, the most southern place one could be and still be in Canada. I was there with colleague Liz White to monitor gunmen as they shot hundreds of double-crested cormorants off their nests.

This was the sixth year the gunmen had done this, disrupting a large, mixed colony of nesting waterbirds: cormorants, night-herons, great blue herons, herring and ring-billed gulls and Canada geese. We had done this the previous Monday, as well; we’ll do it once or twice more this season. There had been egrets nesting there, too, but while we saw one the previous Monday, they seem to have been chased off by the gunfire. This is a national park. Protecting the egrets was part of the goal. I’ll explain all, in a later blog, meanwhile see this. If it sounds brutally insane, yep, I’d say so!

As we drove back we added to the list of road-kills we could identify along the highway: one wild turkey, one American kestrel, several red-winged blackbirds, a couple of opossums, numerous raccoons, a few cottontails and skunks and many undetermined. And then the trucks. One of the problems with being in this business is that you see so much more than others see. What to others is just an anonymous tractor-trailer we know carries 10,000 pheasants jammed close together in tiny crates, no food or water, no protection from the noise and confusion of the highway, or the cold slipstream.

Pheasants? Yes. Chickens are a species of pheasant, but of course we degrade the term “chicken” to mean something not worth worrying about.

We passed trucks in which you could glimpse pigs, so many in miserable discomfort en route to slaughter. At lunchtime we stopped at one of the highway’s pull-offs, called “En Route,” where restaurants sold cooked body parts of similar animals, now at least beyond suffering. Pulled pork? Wings? No thanks.

At home my mailbox contained the long-awaited copy of “Handbook of Mammals of the World, Volume III,” which describes all non-human primate species in the world, with up-to-date data on their population status. My e-mail contained concerns about one primate species, the long-tailed macaque of Southeast Asia and various islands and archipelagos of that region. Some 240,000 live macaques had been exported for “medical, scientific, commercial and breeding purposes from 2004 until July 2010,” according to the book, and according to my e-mail updates, some 100,000 more had been shot as part of a cull.

They, fellow primates, are denied life because they are a nuisance. The ones removed appear to be from the core population; no one knows how many there are, but they have, according to the book, been officially recognized as the first “widespread and rapidly declining” primate species. I can do no better than the quote in my e-mail from an anonymous writer:

“Where to begin? ... Not only do I weep for the inhumane experience the long-tailed macaques experienced before their souls left our planet, I disparage for the plight of our humanity. ... Violence and killing seem to be a strong strain within our collective DNA. ... We do far more damage around this spinning orb that is our home than all the other living species (combined), than proportionally to what these tinier primate cousins of ours are doing to inconvenience the humans in Malaysia. ...

“Every human who knows about this story should feel shame for the fellow humans who perpetrate these heinous encroachments upon others’ habitats and then rationalized their murdering of those effected by the encroachment. ... It’s not too dissimilar to what 'white' Europeans did to the indigenous peoples of the Americas."

And then, remembering that my colleagues and I are working hard to stop the brutal culling of mule deer in central British Columbia, because there are “too many,” I read the news article about 6,000 coyotes killed in Utah’s bounty program, in the hope that there will be more mule deer! They want more deer for the hunters to kill — the human hunters who don’t need to — so the coyotes are slaughtered in absurdly high numbers.

This brutality extends toward our own species. I also read about the horrific case of three young women held captive, raped and abused, in Cleveland, while the story of the terrorist bombing in the Boston Marathon lingered. Isolated incidents involving a few deranged individuals, of course, but also waiting for me was more news from the civil war in Syria, and lest we get all self-righteous, news of a book just out about the detention, also for a decade, of prisoners in Guantanamo never having found guilty of anything other than being of the wrong religion and in the wrong place at the wrong time, held without trial.

What is it about us? Why are so many of us so heartless?

Why is the term “do-gooder” seen as derogatory?

We are to accept that brutal side of our nature in the interest of ... what?

We’re rapidly, recklessly destroying so much, including our planet’s ability to sustain us, and our own ability to survive. We are capable of better. We are the most brutal of species, and never more so than when we reach out to others, our own and other species, to maim and kill.

Barry Kent MacKay
Born Free USA
Zoocheck Inc.

The Challenges of Protecting Animals

During the past six months there’s been a great deal of media coverage about wild animal captivity issues in Ontario. Marineland in Niagara Falls, the Toronto Zoo elephants and Darwin the IKEA monkey have been three of the bigger stories, but a broad assortment of other captivity issues, both large and small, have also been featured in print, radio, television and internet media. There's also been a seemingly endless stream of other kinds of animal stories as well.

The extensive coverage of captivity issues has generated public profile and political interest both municipally and provincially. There are now more politicians than ever who take animal captivity issues (and other animal concerns) seriously or, who, at least, are not dismissive of them. It's a vastly different situation than it was 20 years ago.

That doesn’t mean things are fine today, because they’re not. We still have no comprehensive regulation of Ontario’s wildlife in captivity and our provincial animal protection legislation effectively excludes protection from most animals. However, if we’re smart, we have an opportunity to capitalize on what's happened so that we can move the animal protection agenda forward. But it won't be easy.

At the best of times, there are enormous challenges in making change happen, even when issues have a heightened profile, significant interest and momentum. There is always stiff competition for government attention from a broad spectrum of other issues. And there’s the inevitable, and often substantial, push-back from the individuals and businesses that exploit animals for personal amusement or profit.

One of the lesser known challenges is push-back from government bureaucrats themselves, some who fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo. I’ve actually heard some bureaucrats say, “my job is to make sure nothing changes.” They employ all kinds of issue management strategies, the most common being to delay. An often used tactic is to initiate consultations so that issue discussions drag on for weeks, months or even years. By the time some consultations finish (and many don’t, they just fizzle out), the Ministers and other politicians that were in place when they started are long gone. Even the governing party may have changed. And the new regime may not be as committed as the previous one, so no action is forthcoming. It’s happened again and again and again.

Having said that, there are some amazingly proactive bureaucrats who really do want to move the animal protection agenda forward. And there’s also an ever increasing number of politicians at every level of government who want to do the same. To help them make change happen, we should understand the systems in which they work and the internal challenges they face.

Making change happen for animals is hard. It requires guts, brains, know how and organization. Eternal vigilance isn’t enough. We need to understand how the system works and do what we can to use it and to assist or complement those who are working in it. The first step to doing that is knowledge, so I’d like to recommend three excellent books that will help every Canadian animal protection activist become better at what they do.

The first is The Art of the Possible (a handbook for political activism) by Amanda Sussman. Every activist should read this book. It provides a good synopsis about how Canada’s federal government works, but much of the material also applies to other levels of government and to other jurisdictions.

The second book is Lesli Bisgould’s Animals and the Law. Her synopsis of Canadian laws affecting animals helps explain why things are the way they are and where they should go in the future. It should be on the bookshelf of every Canadian animal protection activist.

And last, but not least, is George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant, Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. If you’ve ever wondered why the other side is so successful at getting their message heard and why so many people seem to ignore the facts about issues, this book will help you understand why.

Rob Laidlaw
Zoocheck Inc.