WARNING: Some details in this story may make some readers uneasy. Discretion is recommended.
BC’s controversial wolf management program is under attack again with troubling news from Alberta.
Shane Ramstead lives in Spruce Grove, a suburb of Edmonton, and is a former fish and wildlife officer.
He told Global News that he came across a nearly dead wolf near the town of Grande Cache in Alberta last winter.
“I first encountered this animal on a trail camera photo,” Ramstead said.
“I use a huge number of trail cameras just to watch for different wildlife and such. It’s rare, there are hardly any wolves around.”
He said most of the wolves in the area were either shot from helicopters or poisoned, but this wolf also migrates over a small geographical area, which is strange behavior.
“From my past career as a grizzly bear fish and wildlife officer, I had some significant experience with the use of radio collars, and a lot of experience seeing them in the caribou,” added Ramstead. rice field.
“And this just didn’t seem right, incidentally.”
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The next time I saw the wolf alive, it was on the roadside trying to eat a deer carcass.
“And I found that its movement was restricted, the way it was trying to move its head, the way it was trying to feed, or the way it was trying to look up and down, it wouldn’t run,” he said. showed unusual wolf behavior.
“After a few days of following some tracks with the snowplow, we found a spot where the snow had lifted, and we were walking west through the Berlin Valley, but it still wasn’t working. rice field.”
Ramstead said he decided to euthanize the wolf after realizing it was in pain. He didn’t say how he did it.
“That collar was very restrictive,” he said. “Obviously I put it on when I was younger and it got through my skin and into my flesh and was causing me discomfort.”
“It just didn’t have a good presence.”
Ramstead said she called the corresponding phone number because the collar was marked.
He received a call back from a wildlife expert at Fort St. John, who told Ramstead that he had collared that particular wolf himself.
The man confirmed he did this as part of the state’s wolf extermination program, which aims to protect the endangered caribou population, Ramstead said.
He then sent a picture of the wolf and explained what had happened to the wolf.
Ramstead says the wolf looks like Judas Wolf, referring to a scenario in which a male alpha wolf was captured, immobilized with a tracking device, and returned to the pack. A helicopter is then dispatched to kill the family unit from the air. Sadie Parr of Wolf Awareness, based in Golden BC, explained the process to her Global News last April.
The BC government has said in the past that the wolf extermination program is a humane way to control populations and increase caribou populations.
But wildlife groups say otherwise.
Bryce Cassavant, Pacific Wild’s Director of Conservation Intelligence, told Global News:
He said he had seen photos from Ramstead and communications from the B.C. government to confirm that this was a B.C. wolf.
“These photos show that the process involved in this particular wolf culling and collaring of wolves, especially the Judah wolf, is likely not a humane process. It is a direct counterargument of
Casavant said the public does not have to take the government’s word that this is a humane way to control the wolf population.
“While this may seem like an offensive statement, I believe that state staff involved in the wolf culling program are on the line of abusing, misunderstanding and falsely providing the Freedom of Information Act. I do,” he said. He said.
Cassavant added that Pacific Wild has been told never to post the photos in the state’s wolf extermination database because they make the photos publicly available.
“This is graphic content. I deeply regret that we have come to this point instead of being able to do the disinfection of the .Unfortunately the government has forced our organization to release this information to the public in this way only left. I was placed in a position where
“And this is the final act of transparency, and that’s what we’re after.”
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Global News reached out to state governments for comment, but did not hear back by the time of publication.
Ramstedt also said he was disillusioned and discouraged by the Canadian government’s efforts to exploit wildlife.
“In my working career, I have witnessed very close-up grievous deaths and massacres at the hands of the government,” he said. “As an environmentalist, I struggled and struggled to support this initiative because many other solutions available to the government were not used. It is a sad state of affairs that political decisions can simply be made to abandon logging in places such as the core caribou habitat, as opposed to the violent slaughter of wildlife that seeks to manage the entire ecosystem of the caribou. It’s kind of a management of , and that’s what they’re doing here.”
“This slaughter of wolves and how they are run on taxpayer money is, in my opinion, abhorrent.”
Ramstead said he hopes at least a breakaway collar will be used so that wolves don’t harass the animals by coming off when they get too big.
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