An Absurd Conundrum

There are laws for security and protection of society and there are laws for the security and protection of the environment, including those protecting wild animals from being taken from their natural environment and kept as pets. The Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources does license those who qualify, to establish wildlife rescue centres, people dedicated to the treatment and rehabilitation of wild animals who are found ill or orphaned.

Sometimes fully successful and appropriately licensed wildlife care and rescue centres come afoul of the Ministry and they are brought up short. Not for any actions on their behalf that are outside their rescue-healing mandate, necessarily, but for reasons that are interpreted as coming afoul of the ministry's guidelines.

A very needed and useful community resource, the Ottawa-Carleton Wildlife Centre closed its doors after years of very professional services to the community, taking in wounded and rescued wild animals, treating them back to health with the able assistance of veterinarians and volunteers, and returning them back to their natural home environment.

They decided to close their doors out of a sense of fatigue and frustration at the difficulty of the tasks involved in taking in animals, adapting the Centre to their needs, rehabilitating them, and freeing them back to nature, all the while having to battle the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Natural Resources who, in doing their jobs, made the rescue group's job impossible.

And here's another instance where yet another rescue group, the Constance Creek Wildlife Refuge, operated by Lynne Rowe out of her Dunrobin home, has been served with a court summons for unlawfully maintaining wildlife in 'captivity'. It's well to remember that what the rescuer considers a temporary home for an injured animal is interpreted as 'captivity' by the ministry.

Ms. Rowe's problem was that she had no license approving her operation. She also rescues abused and unwanted domestic pets. And she fairly recently opened her facilities and her caring heart to the needs of wild animals whom people discover in distress and bring to her. Reason Ms. Rowe had no license for the operation of her facility?

Good question. She has been hard at work for two years on the creation of her Constance Creek Wildlife Refuge, taking training courses on the care of wild animals, and building appropriate housing for them, funded partially by a grant, and partially through her own personal finances. She worked hard to meet the parameters of the standards required to succeed in obtaining a license.

In fact, she applied for that license over three months earlier. At the time she was informed that in two weeks' time she'd have that license in hand. She had been inundated by calls from desperate people who had nowhere to take orphaned or injured squirrels, raccoons, fawns. She desperately wanted that license, but it simply did not materialize.

As things stand at the present time, she is still awaiting receipt of that license. The four MNR officers who appeared, unannounced, to search her property earlier in the week, took away two young raccoons she had been treating. And she was summonsed to appear in court to face a charge of unlawfully keeping wildlife in captivity without a license.

"Two years of hard work could be wasted. The irony is that there is a huge need for animal rescue", she said.