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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2003-01-22, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 22, 2003. PAGE 5. Other Views Nothing stuns like a deer Here’s.a little quiz for you to while away the time waiting for the barkeep to refill the pretzel bowl - what do you reckon is the most dangerous animal in North America? Well, the Yanks are ‘way ahead of us on this one. They’ve got scorpions, diamondback rattlers, coral snakes and black widow spiders not to mention ‘gators, great white sharks and Jesse Helms. But Canada can post some pretty impressive predators. Your Rocky Mountain grizzly - there’s a fella you don’t want to pester for spare change. Cougars pack some pretty impressive switchblade cuticles,, not to mention their dental armory. We’ve got our very own viper, the Massasauga rattlesnake, not to mention Wood Buffalo bison, wolverines, timber wolves, musk oxen, wharf rats, rabid bats - heck, even the lowly mosquito can punch your ticket if it happens to be packing the West Nile Virus in its stinger. But none of these can hold a candle nor a canine tooth to the most dangerous critter on the continent. It’s Rudolph, Which is to say your common, timid, vegetarian, non-belligerent whitetail deer. This year, Bambi and his brethren will knock off more North American primates than all predatory forms of wildlife combined. And how do .they do it? The hard way, mostly - by stepping out in front of our cars and trucks at inopportune moments. Needless to say, this manoeuvre hurts them a lot more than it does us. In the U.S,, deer/vehicle collisions constitute more than a Tories appear to ignore jails Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives are working hard to gain an image of being tough on law and order, but they also are picking up an unsavoury one of locking criminals in jail and throwing away the key. The Tories claim constantly they are the only party that cares about fighting crime and Public Safety Minister Bob Runciman scoffed ‘a Liberal talking about law and order is a walking, talking oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp.’ But the Tories face mounting tragic incidents which suggest they don’t care much what happens to those they put behind bars. They also don’t learn from past errors. The latest concerns are about how they run a youth detention centre where a 17-year-old boy, who had lived on the streets after fleeing sexual abuse by his father, was held on charges of breaking into and stealing from cars. A youth charged with similar offences who had a normal home would have been sent home. The small, thin boy was punched while in the van and had his head slammed against its bars and sides by bigger, tougher youths, some with records of violence. He slept in the centre on a mattress without a pillow on a floor crawling with vermin, and his meals were stolen by gangs of boys, who punched him repeatedly and ordered him to lick up another boy’s sputum. After 10 days, the boy pleaded guilty in court and his lawyer asked he should not be sentenced to further custody because he had suffered enough in the detention centre, and the'judge asked him for his whole story. The judge said other boys from the centre previously appeared in court with visible injuries, but evaded questions or claimed they ‘fell,’ and the boy was brave for speaking out. The judge said the beatings the boy suffered at the centre entitled him to an absolute discharge and it was a ‘hellish’ place that million traffic ‘incidents’ every year. Mostly, the deer involved pay with their lives. Even so, more than 29,000 Americans can expect to be injured in such a crash in any given year, more than 200 of them fatally. The numbers here in Canada are lower but no less alarming. Even Saskatchewan, which boasts the most wide-open of spaces, wracks up 3,620 deer/vehicle collisions annually. And we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves. Since the day the white man arrived we’ve systematically wiped out the wolf, cougar and bear populations in most parts of the continent. This has left the deer bereft of natural predators. Which means the deer population has exploded to...well, to levels they probably enjoyed before the pale guys in the big sailboats first landed. Except that it isn’t the same ‘here’ anymore. We’ve gobbled up hundreds of thousands of square miles of natural deer habitat with our logging, our subdivisions and our road networks. Which means more and more deer on less and less land. And that means trouble. In many parts of North America the vast numbers of deer are stripping the forests of vegetation. Gary Alt, a wildlife biologist with the Pennsylvania Game Eric Dowd From Queen's Park showed reckless disregard for his safety, turned a blind eye to assaults on him and left it up to him to lodge a complaint, which would have exposed him to worse beatings. The judge said the centre was reminiscent of Charles Dickens’s exposes of brutal conditions in Victorian England and Lord of the Flies and violated United Nations’ conventions. The province’s child advocate revealed she told the government a year earlier the centre was overcrowded and not actively supervising detainees, many of whom lived in fear. A union representing guards added gangs there constantly intimidate weaker inmates, but the province would not spend money needed for adequate surveillance. A 16-year-old youth, who also feared other youths, was revealed to have hanged himself in the centre a month earlier. The Tories have had many warnings to which they do not appear to listen. Ombudsman Clare Lewis said in June their hard line against spending has produced intolerable conditions in some correctional facilities. Prisoners should not be mollycoddled, he said, but society has an obligation to see they are treated rationally and with some degree of dignity and respect. Inmates have testified in courts that three commonly sleep in a cell meant for one person, two in bunks on top of each other and the third on a mattress on the floor jammed beside a toilet. Commission fears that eventually “everything will be lost. The deer population will not be healthy and scores of other species will suffer.” Interestingly enough, the situation is reversed on Vancouver Island. There, deer herds are said to be in decline. One of the provincial government’s more brilliant proposed solutions? Kill off a slew of wolves and mountain lions to ‘take the pressure off the deer’. And incidentally, leave more deer for human hunters to make sport with. There’s another island that could teach us all an important lesson in wildlife management. It’s called Isle Royale. You’ 11 find it tucked into the northwest corner of Lake Superior. Isle Royale is uninhabited by humans, but has a goodly population of wolves, moose and deer. Logging, hunting and development have been banned on Isle Royale for most of the last century and all of this one. The animals have been pretty much left to themselves. So did the deer and moose strip the island bare? Did the wolves proliferate and eat the deer and moose right down to the last rib eye steak? Nope, the populations stabilized themselves naturally, without benefit of bidlogists, govern­ ment planners or gun-toting 'harvesters’. We tend to forget that Mother Nature somehow muddled through for thousands of years before we came along to help her. Which means we really should re-think that notion about the whitetail deer as Public Enemy Number One. The most dangerous animal in North America isn’t the ungulate in the headlights. It’s the monkey behind the wheel. Another judge recently cut three months off a sentence for a man convicted of assault because he had spent a month in custody awaiting trial in conditions ‘like the Middle Ages.’ The Tories should be watchful particularly over conditions for youths because a few months ago they were forced to pay $1 rr i I lion in an out-of-court settlement to 12 beaten by guards after being removed from another detention centre. Some had imprints of the guards’ boots on their faces and large patches of hair torn out and the child advocate said they were subjected to ‘a degree of fear, humiliation, indignity and trauma that is not acceptable.’ The government expressed regret and claimed it has improved conditions, but it would have difficulty proving it. Letter Continued from page 4 of our rural communities. We live and work here, we have a vested interest in protecting the environment for ourselves, and future generations. We feel that the trust the provincial government used in certifying farmers to use pesticides, and livestock medicines, seems to be lacking in this legislation. We publicly urge the Minister to take time to examine the regulations again. An April I implementation date does not seem reasonable with the kinds of concern that have been raised by ourselves and other farmers. Farmers wanting more information can call OMAFRA at 1-800-877-424-1380 or website: www omafra.gov.on.ca/scripts/english/rural/th elist/default.asp and click on nutrient management. Sincerely, Neil Vincent, President, Huron County Federation of Agriculture. Bonnie ( Gropp The short of it Killing time Oh, how 1 adore those chirpy little people who sing praises for this wonderful season. Get ouj, and enjoy winter! Give me a break. It is now time for my winter vent. As I sit writing this I am for the umpteenth day, having problems seeing across the street. Those lovely fluffy flakes creating this charming winter wonderland are obscuring everything around me, including the road that I must travel home on this evening. They are fluttering into my frantic thoughts about loved ones traversing from here to there and the back of beyond. All of this doesn’t mean that I’m not happy for the snowmobilers, skiers and boarders. I’m not that much of a curmudgeon. But forgive me if my enthusiasm falls short. While I may not deny you your fun, I shamefully wish it was over. I’ve tried to join your ranks hut I truly could not find the pleasure. When I was younger if I remember correctly, I did more easily see the attributes of our dark months. They helped to create the wonderful diversity of our seasons and in as much offered new activities and adventures. When I was younger I was indeed less negative about winter. But let’s call that naivete. I know better now. When I was younger it wasn’t me who had to clean off the car every morning, brushing and scraping, fingers freezing, as I watched everything cover up as quickly as I cleared it off. When I was younger it wasn’t me who shoveled (My husband would say it still isn’t, but 1 have on occasion. Besides let’s just say then that I feel baoly for him.) When I was young I didn’t have a husband or children to worry about, loved ones finding their way home in a milky world that could turn nastily sour in a heartbea!. When I was young my life was in town so nothing, except school, ever got cancelled When I was young I was never cold, my bones didn’t ache and thare was limitless living looming before me. Well, while hopefully it's still a long way off, I now know, because of my aching bones, that there is a limit to living. Thus I ask you to please excuse me if I get a little frustrated when something like winter puts constraints on my precious time. 1 can’t get where I want to go, people can’t get to me and I am not a big enough person I guess, to not find this all frustrating. You can’t change it, so learn to live with it, right? Believe me, I have, or this diatribe would have been much, much worse I know there’s nothing to be done about winter but it doesn’t mean 1 can’t pray tor its timely conclusion. My thoughts race on through the months - January almost over, February short, March is near the end. I want springtime and if it came tomorrow I’d be thrilled. Some, I suppose, might say that for a person acknowledging that life is limited it’s foolish to wish winter away, that counting the days until spring blooms is hurrying my time along. I don’t see it that way, however, because while I may wish away winter, I will hope time slows come spring. With the same determination that I mark time until the last snowflake melts, 1 slow my pace in the warm season trying to fool the clock. For six months I ask time to speed up. For the next six 1 beg it to slow down. It’s a balance. And, as neither is going to happen anyway just whimsy to kill time.