A couple of weeks ago a conservation (??) officer in Victoria (I’ll call him Ranger Smith) ‘kilt himself a b’ar’. He said he really didn’t want to but the damn thing – that was evidently innocently bopping along the foreshore near to where ‘people’ live – was just getting too close for comfort. And, it was a big and potentially ferocious bear, after all.
No, it wasn’t showing any aggressive behavior, he attested, but for some reason a bit unclear to me from the write-up he couldn’t use a tranquilizer dart on the unfortunate beast and ‘relocate’ it, so he opted to off the ursine, and the good residents of the area would now be able to sleep peacefully at night and no longer need to worry whether they’d secured their garbage, for example.
So, the ultimate excuse was that bears are unwelcome and the penalty may be a lethal one if they get too close to where people live. The point of the equation that seems to be missed, in my humble esteem, is that the situation is one of people living too damn close to where the bears reside; to where the bears have resided for probably hundreds of thousands of years. Folks, on the other hand, have been in these here parts, for about 20 minutes, relatively speaking.
Goddamn city slickers. Really. People come from some big city somewhere or other to Vancouver Island and they expect the only predators to be mugging junkies just like at home in wherever they came from, but not (gasp) wild animals. Wild animals that just might eat ‘em up, especially their kids, because kiddies are young and tender.
This, dear recent interlopers, is Vancouver Island. Vancouver Island is very big and largely populated on a narrow strip along the eastern coastline. Get past that strip and into the hinterland and it’s predominantly wilderness and in that wilderness there be not only dragons but also wild animals of all description. It’s bear country, and cougar country, and wolf country, not to mention assorted raccoons and other bits of fauna that call it home.
Of course, the clash between the city slickers and the beasts of the wilderness has come about because assorted animals like bears and deer have discovered there are some mighty fine pickins where the pale-skinned and stupid bipeds live. There are trees like plum and apple where the fruit goes unpicked and is left to lie on the ground; there are garbage pails that often contain some mighty tasty vittles like fishguts and other household effluvia. For the bambis of the forest, there are gardens galore to be raided without so much as a by your leave.
And, as the deer come, so (periodically) come the cougars. These magnificent felines are heaviest in numbers on Vancouver Island of any place in North America. I think that’s pretty cool. The panty-wetting city slickers don’t. They want them shot. And one of those was just shot down Island last week Actually, I think it was ‘executed’ for the crime of being a cougar.
I have no answer for this other than to say I find it deeply offensive whenever some so-called ‘predator’ is eliminated and I think it is high time that people adjusted, take normal precautions like picking their fruit and seeing that their garbage is secured, or to head back to the big city where your only threats are found in rapists and home-invaders.
And I still think so 