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LETTER: Animal problems?

Mice, and now rats, skunks, raccoons, beavers, coyotes…all can be problematic when they invade our property, eat our gardens, kill our animals.
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Mice, and now rats, skunks, raccoons, beavers, coyotes…all can be problematic when they invade our property, eat our gardens, kill our animals.

However, if you look around and count how many of them exist (except for the mice and rats please!) and how many of us there are, you’ll soon see that they’re having a lot more problems with us than we are with them.

Still, that’s not the way my rabbits, who got eaten by a skunk climbing up to their cages, see it.

Nor did our turkeys whose eggs got stolen repeatedly. So what are we to do?

We tried live trapping and take them elsewhere, hoping they would survive without having to be trapped again – but they usually came back.

We hate the thought of killing wild animals who naturally get attracted to the smell of barnyards, but we’re getting to the point of considering it short of any other ideas or our patience.

Luckily we’ve recently discovered there is a different way to do it, a way that works for the animals, and for us.

The solution consists of modifying the design of the property so the animals considered pests cannot or will not come in what we consider our space.

We met with a young man, Joe Abercrombie, who was moving beavers to a place where they would actually improve the terrain by minimizing fire dangers and protecting against floods.

We found out he’s now started a company called Humane Solutions to help people solve animal problems using humane solutions.

Given that research is showing that wildlife populations have fallen by more than 66 per cent over the last 50 years, we need to find new solutions that allow us to live with animals – if we don’t want to meet the same fate of the unlucky 66 per cent already gone.

Huguette Allen,

rural Lumby