Ottawa Police Chief Vern White pulled no punches with his jabs aimed at the Ministry of Natural Resources, in what he describes as thier ‘hands off’ approach to urban wildlife issues.
It was announced Friday that a private wildlife officer would be hired to deal with all moose, deer, bear and other large mammal encounters around town.
Chief White says that’s fine, but what about the MNR?
“I’ve worked right across this country and I’ve never seen anywhere else where we have big game animals in the city and it becomes the city’s responsibility,” said White.
It will be interesting to see what, if any, response the Chief receives from MNR Minister Linda Jeffrey on this matter.
The identity of the new Wildlife Officer and his/her team has not yet been released, but word on the street is that an announcement is pending.
Outdoorsguy
When oh dear God when will this city grow a spine and stand up for itself? Why should Ottawa have to hire a wildlife officer at it’s expense, when MNR is supposed to deal with this? Talk about a duplication of service! I doubt the Ministry of Natural Resources would have ignored it’s responsibility so quickly if the city had demanded they do their job. Sickening.
Well I will play devils advocate here. Where does it say the Ministry of Natural Recourses is responsible for your safety of wild animal? I have looked at their mandate and it says nothing there about taking care of wildlife on the streets of any city, raccoons on city streets are take care of by the animal control officer. The only difference between a moose, deer, bear, is the size. On the other hand a police officers mandate is so serve and protect .The police are to protect peoples property from being taken or destroyed so I think the police have it all wrong on this issue. I know the police are busy chasing down the bad guys and have not been trained on how to take down an animal so when the animal is killed so be it. The police did the best they could at fulfilling their mandate so every bleeding hart out there stop whining and get on with your life.
Nick says:
June 22, 2010 at 8:17 am
When oh dear God when will this city grow a spine and stand up for itself? Why should Ottawa have to hire a wildlife officer at it’s expense, when MNR is supposed to deal with this? Talk about a duplication of service! I doubt the Ministry of Natural Resources would have ignored it’s responsibility so quickly if the city had demanded they do their job. Sickening.
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you don’t understand, the MNR is a tax collector, it has nothing to do with anything other than collect the tax
The Police want to publicly stay far far away from ever having to kill an innocent, poor, cute, defenseless Winnie the Pooh Bear, Elliot Deer or Bullwinkle Moose. Pass the buck? Imagine how much money is going to be spent on relocating these big game animals? Stop the urban sprawl, today’s big city society is not for me!
WOW, when he roars, you can feel it tremble all the way down to Toronto and further.