The City of Eden Prairie has a program to manage the local population of Canada Geese. Our program seeks to limit the size of their population in our city. We want to have less Canada Geese call Eden Prairie home for two primary reasons. They diminish the water quality of our lakes and ponds with their feces. And, they disrupt human use of beaches, yards and other public spaces.
For the past five years, the City has contracted with a former wildlife biology professor at the University of Minnesota to conduct our goose management activities. He coordinates the collection and relocation of geese out of Eden Prairie. In the early years of the program, many of the geese went to goose preserves. But the goose preserves no longer want additional geese, so geese collected under our program now go to metro area food shelves to feed the hungry and needy.
There is a high level of public support for our goose management program. But not everyone likes it. Recently, representatives from the Humane Society of the United States appeared at a City Council meeting to demand that we end our current goose management program. They believe that we can manage geese in a manner that is more humane than our current program. I agreed to examine their program. I’m looking at it now.
The HSUS has pushed the issue in the Twin Cities media. Over the past month, I’ve done several TV and newspaper interviews about goose management – a subject matter I never imagined that I’d have to master when I was in college preparing for my future career in city management. Last week, for example, KSTP – Channel 5 did a 10pm evening news story about our program. The reporter (Tim Sherno) interviewed a representative from the HSUS; an Eden Prairie resident who is pestered by geese; and me. The story was even-handed and generally accurate, and yet it created the following voice mail message for me the day after the story was on TV:
For the record, I am not an Atheist. I am a Christian. Genesis 1:26-28 fairly describes how I feel about animals. I am not a Redneck, but I did grow up in Iowa, if that’s what she means. I am not a hunter, but I don’t have any problems with people who hunt, or those who fish either. And I won’t get into whether I’m “unattractive” or not. My goodness, that’s a cheap shot.
The voice mail came from an anonymous caller, so there’s no privacy for me to protect. I don’t know who the caller is. I don’t need to know who the caller is. I decided to share this voice mail on my blog to give my readers a chance to hear the kind of feedback that we’ve received on this issue. It’s passionate, to say the least. I don’t like the cheap shots, but it comes with the territory sometimes. The 1st Amendment is a good thing. The 1st Amendment is a good thing.
The City does not operate a goose management program out of a desire to hurt animals. We do it as respectfully and as humanely as possible, and yet still achieve the level of effectiveness we are looking for. We will evaluate new ideas and techniques to manage the goose population in Eden Prairie. But, in the end, we will manage this issue for the primary benefit of our human, not our goose, population. After all, humans pay the bills.
