The proposed hunt of…

The proposed hunt of cormorants is a thinly-veiled slaughter of a native species. The proposed plan has not been created using verifiable data but appears to be based on complaints from a few affected individuals. Individuals who already have remedies to protect their properties if they are in fact negatively affected at all, without a province-wide uncontrolled hunt being needed.

The daily limit is too high, and the proposed hunting season too long. It could result in the near extinction of the species, reversing decades of recovery of the species. Since cormorants are not a food species for humans, they will be shot essentially as a recreational activity, like sending people out to a shooting gallery to kill birds as they wish. Hunting lodge operators may actually see this as a market opportunity and it will become a business, until there are no cormorants left to shoot.

Because the birds would be shot over water or land, the dead bodies will be left to rot in large numbers and will cause problems for other species. Hunters will also accidentally shoot other species while there, so the negative effects could be much more far-ranging than expected.

The proposed 'culling' is unnecessary and an example of bad planning with no real rationale for doing it beyond the wishes of a few people, or a plan to monitor the result after. It should not be carried out and the issue of cormorant populations and their effects should be studied further with experts in the field before a 'solution' is proposed.

As a resident of Toronto, and a user of our waterfront I am aware of the effects of cormorants. I am not opposed to methods to manage natural populations, but the proposed hunt is a coarse measure to address something that may not even be anything more than a small local problem that could be dealt with in other more effective ways.