Denver parks’ morning round-up of defenseless geese is callous and dispiriting

There are so many things wrong with Colorado’s latest planned attack on wildlife — it’s hard to know where to begin.

Two weeks ago, our tax dollars paid a gaggle of federal employees to stalk Canada geese by land and by lake at Denver’s highly popular Washington Park, without witnesses at the break of dawn. It was hardly a stealthy operation because seasonally molting geese cannot fly.

The goose hunt was triggered by Denver Parks and Recreation, whose deputy manager Scott Gilmore explains that it’s mostly about poop. People complain a lot about goose poop, he says.

And so up to 2,200 geese will be rounded up this year, poisoned or gassed, and churned into meat to feed to poor families, our government tells us.

My friend, Lizzie, just texted me after one week and a half of goose captures: “We walked the park this AM and I thought it was odd that there were no geese (when there have been TONS, goslings included).”

If this were about feeding indigent families, which it’s not, killing wildlife in such an unsportsmanlike way is not only repugnant but insulting to those who are seriously working to stop rampant food waste and to help those in need. Just today at King Soopers, I asked the deli worker what they do with the unsold fried chicken at the end of the day. His answer: We throw it out.

The fact that our state hired the feds — an agency called Wildlife Services, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture — is telling. Formerly called Animal Damage Control, this program changed its name after earning a soiled reputation for trapping, poisoning, shooting from aircraft, and chasing down millions of birds and hundreds of coyotes, beavers, skunks, raccoons, bears, mountain lions, badgers, foxes, bobcats, and, inadvertently, many dogs and cats annually, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. One employee was so disgusted with what his agency was doing to wildlife in the late 1980s, that he stacked eleven severed heads of lions killed by government workers in a pyramid beneath a tree and took a photograph that ran in U.S. News and World Report.

Despite this activity, we did see a monumental shift toward humane treatment of wildlife across many states throughout the 1990s; in Colorado, we banned grisly steel-jawed leghold traps, and the unsportsmanlike act of baiting bears with doughnuts for an easy kill. While the alarming reversal of such important progress is another topic for another column, there is a sense that the larger threat to wildlife is not the hired triggerman, nor the bad apple hunter, but rather the urban citizen who has no broad-based understanding of our natural history beyond selfish experience.

Have Denverites become so unattuned to nature that they favor a return to callous, mindless cruelty to simply be rid of poop in the park? It’s not dissimilar to the urbanite who wants to feed a fox, without concern for the animal’s bleak future when it learns to associate food with humans.

This reminds me of the undercurrent of self-absorbed, thoughtless cruelty I witnessed in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., as a young reporter. I was enchanted, along with tourists, to welcome in the magical spring migration of the cliff swallows who fly 6,000 miles from Argentina to south Orange County. But citizens were so disgusted by poop that they hosed down nests along with live fledglings, right into the sewers. They did it at dawn, with no witnesses.

If you watch the film, Winged Migration, you will know the intense life-threatening hazards — flying in hailstorms, being caught in human industrial sludge, surviving hunters, predators and starvation — that migrating birds, especially Canada geese, face when traversing across oceans and continents. To imagine that some of these creatures miraculously reach our state, only to be hijacked for being a nuisance to Denverites who want a poop-free walk in nature, is truly dispiriting.