Western Standard - July 15, 2024


Alberta to put humans ahead of grizzlies

Topics
problem wildlife initiative
Mentioned
Lohan Lowood
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Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

205.35

Word count

1,756

Sentence count

105

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk with Minister Lohan about the new three-pronged approach Alberta is taking to dealing with problem wildlife, such as grizzly bears and elk. We talk about the impact of the new program and how Albertans can be part of the solution.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, thank you very much for joining us today, Minister Lohan. I know you're on the road from all your stampede appearances and getting back up to Valley View. You got a lot of work to do up there. An awesome looking backdrop with the hay bales in the background and in the heat.
00:00:12.640 But I do want to talk, I guess, about something that made the news quite recently. It was that new program dealing with problematic wildlife, whether it's grizzly bears or elk. There's a lot of people confused on what's going on and thinking there's going to be a free-for-all in grizzly hunting or something like that. I guess, could you explain a little on what this new initiative is?
00:00:34.060 Yeah, so basically what we're doing is we've developed a plan and it's kind of a three-pronged plan to deal with problem wildlife. And right now we're focused on grizzly bears and elk because that's two of the biggest concerns that we're hearing from rural Albertans.
00:00:47.380 And this three-pronged plan, it starts with educating the public, providing more opportunities to get the word out to people so that they can avoid those dangerous and costly negative human-wildlife interactions.
00:01:02.260 So we're going to start with education. We're also going to be doing habitat enhancement so that we have places for these wildlife to go, where they can flourish, where they have less chance of having a negative interaction with people.
00:01:17.640 And so that's the first two things. And then the last thing is having Albertans assigned as problem wildlife responders so that they'll have the opportunity to respond to negative wildlife problems.
00:01:33.080 And that'll help fish and wildlife officers deal with those problem animals. 0.98
00:01:38.080 Yeah, and euthanizing a bear, I mean, that's still a last resort. I mean, if there's other means to discourage a bear from being problematic, whether it's relocation or changing situations on the ranch or wherever it may be a problem, you're going to go through those first before you potentially outsource that to somebody to euthanize the animal.
00:01:56.080 Exactly, exactly. There's a matrix that the fish and wildlife officers, conservation officers use when they have a problem wildlife, and that matrix will stay the same as it's been for decades.
00:02:06.080 And so, you know, we've had fish and wildlife officers, conservation officers killing grizzlies ever since the the hunt ended in 2006. And this is just an opportunity for Albertans to be involved to help with that process.
00:02:18.080 And so fish and wildlife officers can spend their time doing other things because it does take it is timely when you have when you have a negative incidence, let's say a grizzly bear kills a bunch of cattle or something like that.
00:02:30.080 The grizzly normally isn't just standing right there and the officer comes up and decides, OK, this bear is going to be put down.
00:02:37.080 The a lot of times the bear moves off and then there has to be a bit of a, you know, a tracking job or a locating job to to solve that problem.
00:02:46.080 But this way Albertans can do that for the officers and it's going to be tightly controlled. There's going to be a lot of conditions and not going to be just turn loose and be able to just do what they want.
00:02:56.080 And that's why, you know, some people are calling this a hunt. And that's that's one of the reasons why it isn't a hunt is because the the the the responder isn't going to have a choice of when, where or what to to to take care of.
00:03:10.080 They will be told the conditions and they'll be very specific, you know, something that's been less mentioned, but it's another part of it is elk herds.
00:03:17.080 And I think people don't necessarily realize I live in Prittis, just south of Calgary.
00:03:21.080 And actually, we have some large elk herds down there that can cause a lot of damage, consume a lot of hay, rip out some bales for livestock producers down that way.
00:03:29.080 And controlling, I guess the mitigating is, you know, important down down there.
00:03:34.080 And your program is kind of allowing for a little bit of elk management as well.
00:03:38.080 Yes, exactly. And so it's it's the same program. It's kind of interesting.
00:03:42.080 There's a lot of people lighten their hair on fire over this program, but they're only talking about grizzly bears and not one of them is mentioning elk because I guess because elk aren't fuzzy and cute and and and they don't raise as much money talking about elk.
00:03:55.080 And but yes, elk do cause a lot of damage to crops in the millions of dollars per year, some years as high as I think, 13 million dollars cost to agriculture producers, the damage that elk costs.
00:04:06.080 So so we want to make sure that, again, just the same as as it is with the grizzly bears, we're going to be focused on the problem animals.
00:04:14.080 Traditionally, we've just let loose tags for elk across a wide area.
00:04:18.080 But we want to make sure that we focus the focus our attention and focus the the harvest on the problem animals to make sure that we relieve some of those stresses that the agriculture producers are suffering from.
00:04:30.080 Yeah. So there would be regulations to I mean, you use the term harvest.
00:04:33.080 A person can't just shoot the elk just to reduce population.
00:04:36.080 It's expected they're going to make use of the meat and products of that animal as well if they took it.
00:04:41.080 Right. Yes, exactly. All those same regulations will apply for sure.
00:04:45.080 So in my area, again, where I live near the foothills, cougars actually are pretty common.
00:04:51.080 They're rarely a problem, but they do cause, again, producers issues now and then.
00:04:56.080 And they do get fish and wildlife take care of them, I guess you could say at times.
00:05:00.080 Is there but that's a different kind of hunt.
00:05:02.080 Like, is there any consideration of expanding into that area or would you leave that to fish and wildlife in the more specialized game control?
00:05:09.080 You know what? We may have to look at it for other species as well. 0.59
00:05:12.080 And cougars is another animal that's the it's their population is rising in certain areas and spreading into areas where they never have been before.
00:05:19.080 And we know we've had problems where grizzlies have came into people's yards, killing dogs, killing livestock and things like that.
00:05:26.080 And so we want to make sure that we take care of them.
00:05:28.080 We don't have them on this program at this point, but it's something we could look at in the future.
00:05:33.080 Because, again, this is about focusing on the problem animals and not the overall the overall populations.
00:05:40.080 Yeah. So do you have some general numbers, though?
00:05:42.080 And how often does it get to the point when a grizzly becomes so problematic that it will need to be euthanized?
00:05:48.080 I mean, I imagine the numbers shouldn't change terribly much, I guess.
00:05:51.080 It's just you're changing the means on how it would be dealt with.
00:05:53.080 Yeah, exactly. Really, the only difference is who's pulling the trigger.
00:05:56.080 And so there's no difference in, again, the matrix that's determined.
00:06:01.080 When Fish and Wildlife or Conservation Officer come to a scene where there's a problem grizzly bear,
00:06:07.080 they'll use the same standard of judging on what to do, whether again, whether it's going to be relocated
00:06:12.080 or whether it's going to be put down or whatever, as they're using now and what they've been using for years.
00:06:18.080 So are we looking perhaps, though, at a couple of dozen a year or a handful?
00:06:24.080 Is there a baseline kind of number average?
00:06:26.080 Yeah, we put a limit at 15. 0.90
00:06:28.080 And I actually doubt that we'll actually get there.
00:06:31.080 I really doubt it.
00:06:32.080 There's about 20 grizzlies plus a year that are being killed in negative human interactions.
00:06:37.080 And we wanted to make sure we put this now.
00:06:40.080 Okay, so afraid, yeah, you know, Minister Lowood is on his way back to Valley View.
00:06:45.080 He was down in Calgary there. There are forest fires and things he has to actually deal with up there.
00:06:50.080 The problem was it's if people are watching.
00:06:53.080 This is the day it's supposed to be, I believe, 34 degrees up that way.
00:06:56.080 His phone overheated, apparently.
00:06:58.080 So sending that much data when you're out in the sun.
00:07:00.080 Look great with that in the background for this conversation, though.
00:07:03.080 So that final point Minister Lowood put out, though, is that we're looking at maybe a dozen bears a year.
00:07:09.080 Alberta, the grizzly bear population is threatened, it's called, but it's not endangered.
00:07:15.080 And with over a thousand bears dealing with a dozen problematic ones isn't going to threaten the population overall or anything like that.
00:07:22.080 So these are the things we just need to clarify in this program, you know, which is, I think, a smart way to do it.
00:07:29.080 We've seen news recently with some deer on an island in Vancouver where they outsourced it to some hunters from, I think, New Zealand and Australia.
00:07:37.080 And they tried flying with helicopters to shoot them and it cost something like 70,000 a deer.
00:07:41.080 They barely got any of them and they even shot the wrong type a few times.
00:07:44.080 So, you know, so many people lighting their hair on fire, so many people are in automatic opposition of anything that's dealing with wildlife.
00:07:52.080 They don't like to think about a bear being shot or things like that.
00:07:55.080 This program is just a pragmatic, proactive sort of way to deal with the ones when they become problematic.
00:08:01.080 It doesn't happen often.
00:08:02.080 But if you're running a ranch or if you live rurally and you've got a bear that's become aggressive or dangerous,
00:08:06.080 or if you've got elk that are reducing your bottom line because you can't keep your hay bales whole, something has to be done.
00:08:13.080 So I appreciate Minister Lohan coming on to clarify that with us.
00:08:17.080 And I just like seeing more common sense initiatives coming out of government.
00:08:21.080 We don't see a heck of a lot of them happening very often.
00:08:23.080 So perhaps the next time we talk to Mr. Lohan, we'll catch him when he's in an air conditioned office so he can speak more at length and comfortably.
00:08:29.080 But I appreciate the time he gave us today.
00:08:31.080 All right. Thanks for tuning in.