Health Canada, under Patty Hajdu, in March 2020 re-authorized poisoning wolves with strychnine.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Big Bad Wolf blamed for habitat loss due to global warming
EDMONTON, Alberta, Canada––Again this Christmas season, Alberta Environment & Parks will welcome Santa’s reindeer by setting out strychnine.
The strychnine will be not for Santa, nor for the reindeer, the North American variety of whom are called caribou, but rather for the Big Bad Wolf, as part of a wildlife management strategy bizarrely mixing up fairy tales.
Tangling the myths of Little Red Riding Hood and Santa Claus in story-telling before the blazing Yule log might inspire not visions of sugar-plums dancing in children’s heads but rather a
Left side European bison / right side American bison.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Wenceslaus, 911-935, left bison alone. Successors alternately hunted & protected them.
BIALOWIEZA FOREST, Poland––European wood bison, also called wisent, at risk of extinction for far longer than their North American cousins, are no longer “vulnerable,” and have accordingly been removed from the “Red List” maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
The century-long recovery of European wood bison from one small Polish herd demonstrates that large land-dwelling wildlife with huge habitat needs can co-exist with humans, where humans are willing to make room for them, even in regions from which the species have been extirpated centuries and even millennia before.