Subject: ERO # 019-3685…

Subject: ERO # 019-3685. Proposal To Allow the Issuance of Licenses for New Dog Train and Trial Areas, and To Allow the Transfer of Licenses.
To Whom it May Concern:
I am an active hunter and have been so for over 44 yrs. I have also enjoyed hunting with a dog (upland game birds and waterfowl) for years too. I am the son and grandson of hunters and trappers. Hunting is part of my upbringing and my heritage. I grew up understanding that anything I was hunting deserved my utmost respect and it is a privilege to be able to hunt that species.
I retired after 35 yrs. as a MNRF Enforcement Manager from an Enforcement Unit in Southern Region. Prior to being a manager I worked in that same unit/district as an Intelligence/Investigations Officer and a field Conservation Officer. In each of these roles, I had involvement with investigations related to Dog Train and Trial Areas(T & Ts) and hound coyote hunting in the wild.
As a result of the experience and knowledge that I have gained through these investigations and intelligence gathering, I am very much opposed to the proposed change to the regulations that will allow the sunset clause for coyote and fox T & Ts that was put in place when the FWCA was enacted. Below are the reasons why I hold this conviction.
1) A great deal of consultation was done by the authors of the new regulations in the lead up to the 1997 enactment. I am aware that consultation was very broad and included T &T operators, T & T users, and other interest groups and the general public. At that point it was decided that the new act would not shut down the T & Ts immediately but that phasing out of them would be the most appropriate course of action.

• What has changed since 1997? Has the public of Ontario become more tolerant toward wildlife being kept in captivity for the sole purpose of having hunter’s dogs chase them around? I doubt that the general public, has become more tolerant towards an activity that is very easy to paint in a very negative light. I have not seen any indication that the public has moved in a similar direction with any other issue.

• Who is requesting this change? I suspect that only the individuals that are involved in the sport of hunting Coyotes, and Rabbits with hounds think that this is a good idea. That is a very small group of people with a vested interest in it and, in my experience, a very different view of how a coyote deserves to be treated than most of us. I have seen a number of 30,000 individuals that are involved in this request. Based on my experience, that number is probably very inflated. It clearly includes many folks that have never participated in hound hunting for coyotes or rabbits, but think by supporting it, they are somehow protecting all hunting from a slippery slope. I suspect that the entire membership of OFAH is included. It is not a form of hunting that is on the up-swing, and in the case of hound hunting coyotes, should not be encouraged to grow, for reasons I will state below.

2) The proposal background refers to the T & T licenced areas being highly regulated. With the experience that I have related to individual licensees and hunters that use or supply coyotes to the licensees, I would suggest that there are many well-meaning regulations and licence conditions in place, but that most of them are very difficult to actually monitor for compliance or enforce.

• I have found that in any group of people there are 3 kind of people:
• Ones that will never knowingly break a law (maybe about 10%)
• Ones that will never obey a law (maybe about 10%)
• Ones that will not break a law if they think they could get caught (80%) This is the group of people that effective regulations and monitoring efforts have the most effect on. I seriously question if the current T & T and hunting regulations are effective to deter this group.

• The issue with the current regulations and licence conditions for T & Ts is that they look really good on the surface, but when you really know how T & Ts work and how difficult it actually is to do an inspection or investigation into T & Ts activities, it is very easy to see how a coyote hunter, a T & T operator or a T & T user would realisation that getting caught violating the regulation or licence conditions is very unlikely. This proved true in the intelligence and evidence I was able to collect when I spent some time really looking into T & Ts and hound coyote hunters. The violations were blatant across the entire MNRF Southern Region.

• This is what we found was happening

• Many T & Ts had to restock their pens annually with new coyotes, but there were very few reporting any injuries or mortality or escapes or any lawful purchases from authorized trappers. The need to restocking had a several causes.(hounds in the pen killing the captive coyotes, escapes under, through or over snowed over or tree damaged fences, etc)

• It became clear that most T & Ts were restocking their pens with coyotes that were illegally captured by hunter’s hounds in the wild. The hunters would find coyote tracks in the snow and release hounds on those tracks. The dogs had radio collars on so the hunters could follow the chase. As chase dogs got tired, they would pick them up and release fresh dogs on the coyote trail. As the coyote appeared to get tired, they would release their “catch hounds”. (Nb: many times these chases lasted for an hour or more) These dogs were not afraid to get bit and actually enjoyed biting the coyote. This resulted in many hound/coyote fights. Then the hunters would walk into the property, pull the dogs off the coyote and snare pole the coyote, (if the coyote was still alive) and drag it out to the road and put it into a dog box to transport it to a T & T.

• So if we had good information that this was happening and that it was clearly inhumane and illegal, why did we not just charge them and put an end to it? Knowing what is happening is way different than being able to prove it in court.

• Answer: Loop Holes (that still exist)
 Inspections of the T & Ts can really only effectively monitor a few of the conditions on a T & T licence. (the condition of the fences on that day, the presence of a log book that has some entries in it, condition of cover structures, etc) For the rest of the regulations and conditions, the inspector is left trusting the operator’s answers. (how many coyotes are in the pen, if there have been any injuries, mortality or escapes, if any coyotes have been brought into the pen, how many hounds have run in a day or how many days in a row, what and how much supplemental food has been fed to the coyotes, etc)

 Conservation Officers have caught several hound coyote hunters with captured live coyotes, but were unable to make them release them, or charge them for capturing coyotes for the purpose of keeping them in captivity. There is a section that allows a person to have a wild animal in captivity for a day, if it is injured, to allow them to get it medical attention. Each of these coyotes had been caught after an exhausting chase and a dog fight, often with several dogs in the fight, so each of the coyotes were injured to some extent and the hunters knew of this exception and claimed that is why they had the coyote. Nothing the CO could do at that point.

• So how do I know all this? After going several seasons of being frustrated by not being able to deal effectively with these blatant and inhumane violations I decided to reach out to the other MNRF Enforcement Units in Southern Region to see if they were seeing the same patterns. It was clear that all of Southern Region, which is the area of the province where almost all hound coyote hunting occurs, was seeing similar occurrences. At that point it was decided that the only way to collect the evidence required to charge hunters and T & T operators for these blatant offences was to embark on a Special Investigation (Undercover Investigation), because inspections and uniform field enforcement had not been effective. So we enlisted an undercover officer to join a specific hound coyote hunting group who was led by a T & T operator for the winter. He was able to collect evidence of the following:

• There were at least 3 groups of hound coyote hunters that were actively illegally capturing live coyotes via dog fights with exhausted coyotes operating in that area.
• These groups were supplying at least 2 licenced Coyote T & Ts.
• The main group the UC had contact with (the one that had the T & T operator leading it), did not carry firearms, but just relied on the hounds to catch the coyotes at the end of each long run.
• The same coyote group had an exhausted coyote “go to ground” in a window well at the back of an Amish Church during a service. The resulting dog fight, brought the entire congregation out to see what was happening. Our UC Officer had a very difficult time to get the dogs to let go of the coyote. The coyote was then stuffed in a small (40 gal) plastic barrel with 2 previously caught coyotes by the T & T operator to be transported back to the barn in his T & T.
• On one day, the group caught 7 live coyotes in the same way, they transported them all back to the barn and 6 of them were put into a very small pen in the T & T operators barn. The other coyote was forgotten and somehow survived for a week in a small dog box on the back of a hunting truck for a week without food or water.
• When we executed a search warrant at the end of the winter hound coyote hunting season, we seized 23 live coyotes that were being kept in a very small pen (room) inside the T & T operator’s barn. They had been stored there to be released into the T & T for the spring, summer, fall pen season.
• During an inspection, prior to and in preparation for the UC project, the T & T operator had told the inspector that he still had the same coyotes that he started with many years ago. In fact, as the UC learned, each year all the coyotes had either been killed and/or had escaped from his pen, but T & T operator didn’t care because he enjoyed spending the winter catching new ones.
• At the time of our takedown of the primary T & T operator, the UC officer also determined that another T & T operator was in the same position, he and his hunting gang had also illegally caught coyotes throughout the winter hound coyote hunting season and had them in captivity ready to release into his T & T as soon as spring maintenance of his fences were completed.
• That same winter, another hunting party had caught live coyotes using the same methods, and traded the primary T & T operator for free hound running time in his T & T in the summer.
• The UC also determined that all the violations he observed had been going on for years. They had carried on this way without the fear of prosecution because they knew all the loopholes to use to make prosecution difficult. They also thought it just made sense to use the coyotes they were chasing and catching anyway to restock the T & Ts so they had a place to run their dogs in the non-snow season.
• They were also very concerned that people should not be told about how every one of their coyote chases ended with their dogs piling onto an exhausted coyote. They recognized that the general public would “not understand”. Or in other words be outraged.

• At the end of this investigation, over 150 charged were laid against hunters within 2 of the hound coyote hunting groups and the T & T operator that was the primary focus of this investigation. The same T & T operator’s T & T licence was revoked by the Minister of Natural Resources. A good result, but this was only made possible because of a very complicated and time consuming Special Investigation. We were unable to use normal compliance monitoring and enforcement methods to deal with this issue because the regulations and the tools available to regulate this T & T Licence were insufficient.

• It is important to also point out that the regulations and licence conditions that exist today are the exact same as were in place when this investigation occurred. This investigation did not result in any regulatory changes.

3) I suspect that part of the assessment of this regulation change will have included a search of data bases to see if there have been any issues found in the last several years at the T & T facilities. I am sure that if that search happened, they would have found no record of any issues with T & T facilities. I would like to add a bit of context to that:

• About a year and a half before COVID all the MNRF staff that were responsible for the licencing/authorisations (not including hunting and fishing licences) and compliance monitoring of those licences/authorisations were advised that travel had been restricted and that no unnecessary travel would be allowed. This effectively prevented those staff from going out to T & Ts to conduct inspections unless there had been a complaint. Then COVID happened and that further restricted their ability to do proactive compliance monitoring. So it would not surprise me if there has not been anyone checking to see if the remaining T & Ts are complying with regulations and conditions.

4) This proposal indicates that new T & Ts can provide trials to allow more people to engage in the sport of testing their dogs in hound hunting coyotes. I am not sure that there is as big a demand for this as is indicated. I have never heard there are a bunch of folks who do not want to hunt coyotes in the wild, but just want to do dog trials. The folks that I am aware of who go to trails spend most of the winter out running coyotes from concession road to concession road until they catch or shoot it. I know that this proposal does not contemplate the value of hunting coyotes in the wild, but I have an opinion, and coyote T & Ts would not exist if hunting with hounds in the wild was not allowed.

5) I have also seen it stated that the T & T facilities allow the dogs to be trained in a safe manner that improves their ability to only run one species which will reduce conflict with others. I do see the logic in that, but also have an informed view of what the real cause of conflict between hound coyote hunters and the public is. It is not generally that hounds are chasing species other than coyotes, it is that hounds running coyotes in the wild will inevitably chase them through private land that is posted against hunting. The hound hunters will not keep a dog that chases anything other than coyotes, but appear to be unable or in some cases unwilling to prevent their hounds from trespassing to hunt.

6) The other thing that I think important to highlight here is that the T & T operators are almost all hound coyote hunting enthusiasts and are not in it to make any real amount of money and really are not able to generate a significant profit by operating these T & Ts. That requires them to run them on a shoe string budget. As a result, we found that individuals that run T & Ts cut costs where ever they could. (using donated unmatched fence pieces, doing repairs on fencing themselves when they get a chance instead of hiring someone to do it in a timely manner, not wanting to pay for trappers to catch coyotes, doing their own vet treatment, feeding coyotes dead stock that they can get for free, etc.)

7) I acknowledge that my experience with hound coyote hunters and Coyote T & T operators was heavily focuses on serious violators of the regulations and licence conditions and that not all hound coyote hunters or T & T operators have the exact same attitudes, but also recognise that this proposal will allow others to open more T & Ts with the same lack of effective oversight, so similar activities could occur undetected for years again.

Please do not go forward with this proposed regulation change. We almost had it right in 1997 by sunsetting the T & T authorisations. To open it all up again and allow it to continue with no real effective way to ensure the humane operation of them, is misguided in my view.