As a boater and an angler…

As a boater and an angler with a recreational license, I’m appalled at the indifference to wildlife science and public safety in this proposal. Let’s call this proposal what it is: a plan to extirpate an entire species of bird from the province, without any compelling scientific evidence. If cormorant colonies are an issue with sport fish or commercial fish in specific areas, numbers could be controlled by egg oiling and selective culling. But this policy doesn’t care about the proper management of a wild species.

The double crested cormorant is not a game bird. Nobody hunts them to eat them, like geese or ducks. And if you make something a “game” animal, it should follow that the government will manage that resource accordingly, as it does other game animals. You don’t accomplish this by letting people hunt them provincewide from March 15 to December 31, with a personal limit of 50 a day and no possession limit, and let them hunt from stationary boats. You have created (intentionally) a recipe for people who hate cormorants to go to rookeries or approach flocks and simply open fire, with a goal of killing every last one of them.

As someone who is regularly on the water on Georgian Bay and hikes in marsh areas where there are limited hunting seasons for waterfowl, this proposal terrifies me. I will have to deal with shotgun-wielding people firing away most of the year, and boats full of people who are out to kill as many cormorants as their daily limit allows. Cormorants flock in open water. Hunters will be firing into these flocks while I and my family could be in the vicinity. You are making Ontario unsafe to satisfy prejudices against an animal. We might as well go back to poisoning wolves with bait and beating to death all the rattlesnakes.