03/10/2007
The Sierra Club and other environmental groups have claimed that the number of geese should be reduced (that is, that many of them should be killed) in the Canadian Anacostia Park. The reason for this massacre would be to make it easier that some plants that they eat reproduce better.
Stephen Syphax, National Park Service Supervisory Resource Management Specialist, defended that the birds be “euthanized and prepared properly for human consumption”. This is certainly a misuse of the term euthanasia, since they are not in agony or in agonising pain without possible cure, but rather being killed.
Another similar piece of news has to do with massive killings of free animals in Northamerica.
In Yellowstone wolves have been extinct a long time ago. After this, they were deliberately reintroduced by humans. This of course was not done out of any concern for nonhuman animals, on the contrary, the reason was no other than reestablishing some environmental conditions that had been altered as a result of the previous killing of all the preexisting wolves. Moreover: one of the main interests in reintroducing the wolves was to kill elks, since they were one of the reasons why certain trees were not thriving as before the wolves were made extinct.
Now the US Government has decided to implement a measure in contradiction to this and to kill more than half of the wolves which live in the area where Yellowstone is. Around 700 of these animals could then be slaughtered.
This news is particularly infuriating given that in an case such as this humans have been actually that these animals reproduce in a certain area only to kill them after a while.