You Are A Pest

if you can’t be eaten, stuffed and mounted, angled, shot, trapped, snared or skinned.

Don’t be disingenuous (my new favorite word) SWF.  Your goals and purpose are very clear.  If an animal interferes with your goals or has no value to you or to your members, despite what role that said animal might fill in an ecosystem, it becomes a pest.  Even if said animal is native to North America and Saskatchewan.  Be clear.  This is not about “damage to songbird populations”.  Seriously.  Ravens do not need to predate songbird nests when carrion is so readily available.  What carrion, you ask?  How about the dead deer and coyotes and ground squirrels scattered along grid roads and highways.  How about the garbage sitting in landfill sites.  How about the carrion sitting in fur trappers leghold traps.  Ah.  There’s the rub.  A cull of ravens is not about conservation of songbirds or  “managing” wildlife, it’s about protecting the interests of trappers…

The Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation is a nonprofit, non-government, charitable organization of over 27,000 members in 120 branches across Saskatchewan representing every walk of life.

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The Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation strongly supports the principle that hunting, trapping, and fishing contribute to the management and therefore the sustainability of our wildlife resources. Rights of the hunters, trappers, and anglers should not be infringed upon and legislation to protect them from harassment while participating in these activities should be enacted.

The raven has committed no crime other than to fulfill its natural place in the ecosystem, cleaning up the dead stock.

Rural communities, trappers and the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation are lobbying the province to take the crow-like birds off the list of protected species and declared pests.

That would allow people to kill ravens, the same way they are currently allowed to kill crows, magpies and gophers.

Those who consider the ravens pests note the bird’s population is up and they are destroying crops. There are also complaints they’re damaging fur-bearing animals in traps and could be injuring livestock.

ORLY…”could be ” injuring livestock?

“There’s lots of stories of ravens poking at the eyes of newborns and that sort of thing,” said Darrell Crabbe, a spokesman for the Saskatchewan Wildlife Federation.

Oh, that’s credible.  Hyperbole and sensationalism.  This is not about ravens poking out the eyes of baby animals; it’s about ravens destroying leg trapped, fur bearing animals.  And destroying crops?  Really?  Ravens are solitary animals.  How much damage are they going to cause to crops?  Lets see some hard proof and some numbers before we start shooting ravens on sight.  And don’t compare ravens to magpies.  Magpies do cause significant damage to songbirds populations.  As do cats and merlins and humans and house sparrows…