The Killing of the Coyotes in Stanley Park, and Calling for Wildlife Care, Not Cull

Listen to the extended podcast here!

To start the show, Elyse and Alison sing their praises about 2 new (to them) vegan hot spots in Vancouver that they had the pleasure of tasting in the past week: a milkshake and poutine at the VegOut Food Truck, and authentic Neopolitan pepperoni pizza at Pizzaria Grano at 3240 Main Street. Going vegan for the planet and the animals has never been so easy! But really, anyone would love this comfort food.

Kelly Ready on Conservation of our BC Wildlife, and Digging Deeper into the Cull of the Stanley Park Coyotes – Calling for Cooperation and Accountability

Conservationist Kelly Ready learned to stand up to injustice from a young age. In his early 20s as a young chief shop steward, he exposed corruption within his trade union, and as a result, was blackballed from union work and forced to start his own company. Designing and manufacturing machinery for forestry and logging companies gained him first-hand insight into their destructive practices. His company developed technical solutions to mitigate environmental impact.

Retiring at a young age, Kelly founded Black Suns Art Studio in East Vancouver to help youth at risk learn skills towards a trades or industrial art career. He also became more involved in animal rights, locally and abroad. In 2013, he founded Stop Animal Brutality and devoted most of his time to animal rights and wildlife conservation work.

He worked with many individual organizations, as well as BC government agencies, but after years of not substantially moving the needle nor addressing the root cause of rampant habitat destruction from out-of-control logging and development practices; increased human-wildlife conflict and resultant destruction of wildlife; and knowledge of inadequate government forestry policy, Kelly reached out to various progressive, well-informed stakeholders groups to form the organization Unlikely Allies in 2018. Its goal is to preserve wildlife habitat from contrasting perspectives of usage: the hunting and fishing industries, eco-tourism and science-based conservation, and animal rights.

Kelly continues to work with many levels of government agencies including municipally, provincially and federally-elected officials, conservation groups, industry, NGOs, scientists, and economists with the goal to build the case that our economy is stronger with healthy and abundant wildlife and wildlife habitat.

Kelly brings a wealth of information to share about his internal insights into the coyote cull situation in Stanley Park these days, and in this feature interview, he shares with us his knowledge so that you may be armed, as citizens, with this information to know about what is happening in our Province. The “ball was dropped” in this terse decision to kill all the coyotes in Stanley Park last week as a method of applying a Band-aid response to the 45 coyotes attacks on humans in the Park this year, and this cannot be carried out again.

Animal Advocates Hold Vigil for the (up to) 35 Coyotes to be Killed

On Wednesday, animal and conservation advocates gathered at the Vancouver Park Board office to hold vigil for the 35 coyotes who were ordered to death last week by the BC Provincial government as a terse response to the escalating coyote attacks upon humans in Stanley Park due to feeding of the wildlife.

Local animal advocate David Isbister was there, and we asked him to comment on the origins of the situation that led up to the decision of a cull. We were surprised to learn that people have been “baiting” coyotes with meat, for example, to enable them to take photos for Instagram. (Completely inappropriate behaviour!)

Here is a video of this short interview:

UPDATE! September 21st: Stanley Park to re-open immediately.

We also did a short interview with animal law advocate Becky Jenkins and Vancouver Humane Society Executive Director Amy Morris to share their thoughts about the cull of the coyotes and why we need to care about our urban widlife. This interview can be seen here: