To the editor;
A few years ago I read about an Alberta aboriginal senior citizen who had insisted upon animal-control officials not disturbing – let alone snuffing out – a couple of adult bears that were invading her garbage containers.
As bitterly ironic fate would have it, a few days later those bears, somehow, got into physical contact with the woman and mortally mauled her.
When I read about it, I felt naught but admiration for that woman: I believe(d) that she so much respected nature, though especially the animal life, that she in essence sacrificed her life for their lives and freedom.
When are we going to clearly acknowledge the great injustices being committed against wild animals (in this case stray adult bears and their cubs near Port Hardy) by human encroachment via deforestation and development on the animals’ natural home grounds that had been theirs many millennia before colonization?
Too many stray wild bears, and other such potentially dangerous animals, are being killed when they behave in a threatening manner towards humans.
Thus we’re ready and willing to kill them when we could make it a regulated rule to dose them with as much potent tranquilizer as is necessary to encase and relocate them all, alive and well.
But it appears that humanity’s superior-minded nature allows our collective conscience to simply shoot dead such animals for reacting in their natural, predatory manner.
Frank Sterle Jr.
White Rock
